axe began to rain blows upon the log at his feet.

Sounds of honest toil were once more to be heard in the wood lot; and,
though I could not hear the other, I surmised that the sledge of Uncle
Abner now rang merrily upon his anvil. Both he and Pete had doubtless
noted at the same moment the approach of Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill,
who was spurring her jaded roan up the long rise from the creek bottom.

* * * * *

My stalwart hostess, entirely masculine to the eye from a little
distance, strode up from the corral, waved a quirt at me in greeting,
indicated by another gesture that she was dusty and tired, and vanished
briskly within the ranch house. Half an hour later she joined me in the
living-room, where I had trifled with ancient magazines and stock
journals on the big table. Laced boots, riding breeches, and army shirt
had gone for a polychrome and trailing tea gown, black satin slippers,
flashing rhinestone rosettes, and silk stockings of a sinful scarlet.
She wore a lace boudoir cap, plenteously beribboned, and her sunburned
nose had been lavishly powdered. She looked now merely like an indulged
matron whose most poignant worry would be a sick Pomeranian or
overnight losses at bridge. She wished to know whether I would have tea
with her. I would.

Tea consisted of bottled beer from the spring house, half a ham, and a
loaf of bread. It should be said that her behaviour toward these
dainties, when they had been assembled, made her seem much less the worn
social leader. There was practically no talk for ten active minutes. A
high-geared camera would have caught everything of value in the scene.
It was only as I decanted a second bottle of beer for the woman that she
seemed to regain consciousness of her surroundings. The spirit of her
first attack upon the food had waned. She did fashion another sandwich
of a rugged pattern, but there was a hint of the dilettante in her work.

And now she spoke. Her gaze upon the magazines of yesteryear massed at
the lower end of the table, she declared they must all be scrapped,
because they too painfully reminded her of a dentist's waiting-room. She
wondered if there mustn't be a law against a dentist having in his
possession a magazine less than ten years old. She suspected as much.

"There I'll be sitting in Doc Martingale's office waiting for him to
kill me by inches, and I pick up a magazine to get my mind off my fate
and find I'm reading a