s too much. It now seemed time to ask questions, and I did so in
a winning manner; but so deaf in her backward musing was the woman that
I saw it must all come in its own way.

"We got to make up over that bench yet," she said at last; and we rode
out past the ideal stable--its natty weather vane forever pointing the
wind to the profit of no man--through another gate of superb cunning,
and so once more to an understandable landscape, where sane cattle
grazed. Here I threw off the depression that comes upon one in places
where our humankind so plainly have been and are not. Again I questioned
of Broadmoor and its vanished people.

The immediate results were fragmentary, serving to pique rather than
satisfy; a series of _hors d'oeuvres_ that I began to suspect must form
the whole repast. On the verge of coherence the woman would break off to
gloat over a herd of thoroughbred Durhams or a bunch of sportive
Hereford calves or a field teeming with the prized fruits of
intermarriage between these breeds. Or she found diversion in stupendous
stacks of last summer's hay, well fenced from pillage; or grounds for
criticising the sloth of certain of her henchmen, who had been told as
plain as anything that "that there line fance" had to be finished by
Saturday; no two ways about it! She repeated the language in which she
had conveyed this decision. There could have been no grounds for
misunderstanding it.

And thus the annals of Broadmoor began to dribble to me, overlaid too
frequently for my taste with philosophic reflections at large upon what
a lone, defenceless woman could expect in this world--irrelevant,
pointed wonderings as to whether a party letting on he was a good ranch
hand really expected to perform any labour for his fifty a month, or
just set round smoking his head off and see which could tell the biggest
lie; or mebbe make an excuse for some light job like oiling the
twenty-two sets of mule harness over again, when they had already been
oiled right after haying. Furthermore, any woman not a born fool would
get out of the business the first chance she got, this one often being
willing to sell for a mutilated dollar, except for not wishing financial
ruin or insanity to other parties.

Yet a few details definitely emerged. "Her" name was called Posnett,
though a party would never guess this if he saw it in print, because it
was spelled Postlethwaite. Yes, sir! All on account of having gone to
England from Boston a