like he was, but sinking my nails right fierce into the back of his little fat neck.  He relaxed the tension in his own fingers.  He was hurt, for the tears started, but he never cried.  He just looked puzzled and kept on laughing, being bright to see I could play the game, too.  Only he saw it wasn’t so good a game as he’d thought.  I wonder what made me think of that, now!  I don’t know.  Come—­from yonder doorway we can see him as he dances.’

“And Ellabelle was saying gently to one and all, with her merry peal of laughter, ‘Ah, yes—­once a Scotchman, always—­’

“My land!  It’s ten o’clock.  Don’t them little white-faced beauties make the music!  Honestly I’d like to have a cot out in the corral.  We miss a lot of it in here.”

V

NON PLUSH ULTRA

Sunday and a driving rain had combined to keep Ma Pettengill within the Arrowhead ranch house.  Neither could have done this alone.  The rain would merely have added a slicker to her business costume of khaki riding breeches, laced boots, and flannel shirt as she rode abroad; while a clement Sabbath would have seen her “resting,” as she would put it, in and round the various outbuildings, feeding-pens, blacksmith shop, harness-room, branding-chute, or what not, issuing orders to attentive henchmen from time to time; diagnosing the gray mule’s barbed-wire cut; compounding a tonic for Adolph, the big milk-strain Durham bull, who has been ailing; wishing to be told why in something the water hadn’t been turned into that south ditch; and, like a competent general, disposing her forces and munitions for the campaign of the coming week.  But Sunday—­and a wildly rainy Sunday—­had housed her utterly.

Being one who can idle with no grace whatever she was engaged in what she called putting the place to rights.  This meant taking out the contents of bureau drawers and wardrobes and putting them back again, massing the litter on the big table in the living-room into an involved geometry of neat piles that would endure for all of an hour, straightening pictures on the walls, eliminating the home-circles of spiders long unmolested, loudly calling upon Lew Wee, the Chinaman, who affrightedly fled farther and farther after each call, and ever and again booming pained surmises through the house as to what fearful state it would get to be in if she didn’t fight it to a clean finish once in a dog’s age.

The woman dumped a wastebasket of varied rubbish into the open fire, leaned a broom against the mantel, readjusted the towel that protected her gray hair from the dust—­hair on week days exposed with never a qualm to all manner of dust—­cursed all Chinamen on land or sea with an especial and piquant blight invoked upon the one now in hiding, then took from the back of a chair where she had hung it the moment before a riding skirt come to feebleness and decrepitude.  She held it up before critical eyes as one scanning the morning paper for headlines of significance.