“Come have some tea,” she cordially boomed as she passed.  I returned uncertainly.  Tea?  Yes.  But—­However, the door would be shut and the Asiatic probably diverted.

As I came again to the rear of the ranch house Mrs. Pettengill, in khaki riding breeches, flannel shirt, and the hat of her trade, towered bulkily as an admirable figure of wrath, one hand on her hip, one poising a quirt viciously aloft.  By the corral gate Buck Devine drooped cravenly above his damaged saddle; at the door of the bunk house Sandy Sawtelle tottered precariously on one foot, his guitar under his arm, a look of guilty horror on his set face.  By the stable door stood the incredibly withered Jimmie Time, shrinking a vast dismay.

“You hear me!” exploded the infuriated chatelaine, and I knew she was repeating the phrase.

“Ain’t I got to mend this latigo?” protested Buck Devine piteously.

“You’ll go up the gulch and beyond the dry fork and mend it, if you whistle that tune again!”

Sandy Sawtelle rumpled his pink hair to further disorder and found a few weak words for his conscious guilt.

“Now, I wasn’t aiming to harm anybody, what with with my game laig and shet up here like I am—­”

“Well, my Lord!  Can’t you play a sensible tune then?”

Jimmie Time hereupon behaved craftily.  He lifted his head, showing the face of a boy who had somehow got to be seventy years old without ever getting to be more than a boy, and began to whistle softly and innocently—­an air of which hardly anything could be definitely said except that it was not “The Rosary.”  It was very flagrantly not “The Rosary.”  His craft availed him not.

“Yes, and you, too!” thundered the lady.  “You was the worst—­you was singing.  Didn’t I hear you?  How many times I got to tell you?  First thing you know, you little reprobate—­”

Jimmie Time cowered again.  Visibly he took on unbelievable years.

“Yes, ma’am,” he whispered.

“Yes, ma’am,” meekly echoed the tottering instrumentalist.

“Yes, ma’am,” muttered Buck Devine, “not knowing you was anywheres near—­”

“Makes no difference where I be—­you hear me!”

Although her back was toward me I felt her glare.  The wretches winced.  She came a dozen steps toward me, then turned swiftly to glare again.  They shuddered, even though she spoke no word.  Then she came on, muttering hotly, and together we approached the ranch house.  A dozen feet from the door she bounded ahead of me with a cry of baffled rage.  I saw why.  Lew Wee, unrecking her approach, was cold-bloodedly committing an encore.  She sped through the doorway, and I heard Lew Wee’s frightened squeal as he sped through another.  When I stood in the room she was putting violent hands to the throat of the thing.

“The hours I spend with th—­” The throttled note expired in a very dreadful squawk of agony.  It was as if foul murder had been done, and done swiftly.  The maddened woman faced me with the potentially evil disk clutched in her hands.  In a voice that is a notable loss to our revivals of Greek tragedy she declaimed: