“I give orders plain enough, but say, it’s like a brush fire—­you never know when you got it stamped out.”

From the kitchen came the sound of a dropped armful of stove wood.  Hard upon this, the unctuous whining tenor of Jimmie Time: 

    Oh-h-h mem-o-reez thu-hat blu-hess and bu-hurn!

“You, Jimmie Time!” It is a voice meant for Greek tragedy and a theatre open to the heavens.  I could feel the terror of the aged vassal.

“Yes, ma’am!” The tone crawled abasingly.  “I forgot myself.”

I was glad, and I dare say he had the wit to be, that he had not to face the menace of her glare.

III

THE REAL PERUVIAN DOUGHNUTS

The affairs of Arrowhead Ranch are administered by its owner, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, through a score or so of hired experts.  As a trout-fishing guest of the castle I found the retainers of this excellent feudalism interesting enough and generally explicable.  But standing out among them, both as a spectacle and by reason of his peculiar activities, is a shrunken little man whom I would hear addressed as Jimmie Time.  He alone piqued as well as interested.  There was a tang to all the surmises he prompted in me.

I have said he is a man; but wait!  The years have had him, have scoured and rasped and withered him; yet his face is curiously but the face of a boy, his eyes but the fresh, inquiring, hurt eyes of a boy who has been misused for years threescore.  Time has basely done all but age him.  So much for the wastrel as Nature has left him.  But Art has furthered the piquant values of him as a spectacle.

In dress, speech, and demeanour Jimmie seems to be of the West, Western—­of the old, bad West of informal vendetta, when a man’s increase of years might lie squarely on his quickness in the “draw”; when he went abundantly armed by day and slept lightly at night—­trigger fingers instinctively crooked.  Of course such days have very definitely passed; wherefore the engaging puzzle of certain survivals in Jimmie Time—­for I found him still a two-gun man.  He wore them rather consciously sagging from his lean hips—­almost pompously, it seemed.  Nor did he appear properly unconscious of his remaining attire—­of the broad-brimmed hat, its band of rattlesnake skin; of the fringed buckskin shirt, opening gallantly across his pinched throat; of his corduroy trousers, fitting bedraggled; of his beautiful beaded moccasins.

He was perfect in detail—­and yet he at once struck me as being too acutely aware of himself.  Could this suspicion ensue, I wondered, from the circumstance that the light duties he discharged in and about the Arrowhead Ranch house were of a semidomestic character; from a marked incongruity in the sight of him, full panoplied for homicide, bearing armfuls of wood to the house; or, with his wicked hat pulled desperately over a scowling brow, and still with his flaunt of weapons, engaging a sinkful of soiled dishes in the kitchen under the eyes of a mere unarmed Chinaman who sat by and smoked an easy cigarette at him, scornful of firearms?