the new gun again.  ’I bet you’re so superstitious you’d take this here shiny new implement off my hands at cost if I hinted I’d part with it.’  ‘I almost believe I would,’ says Safety First.  ’Well, it don’t seem like I’d have much use for it after all,’ says Harvey.  ’Of course I can always get a new one if my fancy happens to run that way again.’

“So old Safety First buys a new loaded rifle that he ain’t got a use on earth for.  It would of looked to outsiders like he was throwing his money away on fripperies, but he knew it was a prime necessity of life all right.  The parcels post ain’t done him a bit of good since, though I send him marked pieces in the papers every now and then telling how the postmaster general thinks it’s a great boon to the ultimate consumer.  And I mustn’t forget to send Harvey six bits for them three packages that come to-night.  That’s what we do.  Otherwise, him being morose and turbulent, he’d get a new gun and make ultimate consumers out of all of us.  Darned ultimate!  I reckon we got a glorious Government, like candidates always tell us, but a postmaster general that expected stage drivers to do three times the hauling they had been doing with no extra pay wouldn’t last long out at the tail of an ... route.  There’d be pieces in the paper telling about how he rose to prominence from the time he got a lot of delegates sewed up for the people’s choice and how his place will be hard to fill.  It certainly would be hard to fill out here.  Old Timmins, for one, would turn a deaf ear to his country’s call.”

Lew Wee having now cleared the table of all but coffee, we lingered for a leisurely overhauling of the mail sack.  Ma Pettengill slit envelopes and read letters to an accompanying rumble of protest.  She several times wished to know what certain parties took her for—­and they’d be fooled if they did; and now and again she dwelt upon the insoluble mystery of her not being in the poorhouse at that moment; yes, and she’d of been there long ago if she had let these parties run her business like they thought they could.  But what could a lone defenceless woman expect?  She’d show them, though!  Been showing ’em for thirty years now, and still had her health, hadn’t she?

Letters and bills were at last neatly stacked and the poor weak woman fell upon the newspapers.  The Red Gap Recorder was shorn of its wrapper.  Being first a woman she turned to the fourth page to flash a practised eye over that department which is headed “Life’s Stages—­At the Altar—­In the Cradle!—­To the Tomb.”  Having gleaned recent vital statistics she turned next to the column carrying the market quotations on beef cattle, for after being a woman she is a rancher.  Prices for that day must have pleased her immensely for she grudgingly mumbled that they were less ruinous than she had expected.  In the elation of which this admission was a sign she next refreshed me with various personal items from a column headed “Social Gleanings—­by Madame On Dit.”