d the day's mail came. From a canvas
sack Lew Wee spilled letters and papers on the table. Whereupon the yarn
was laid by while Ma Pettengill eagerly shuffled the letters. She thought
fit to extenuate this eagerness. She said if people lived forever they
would still get foolishly excited over their mail; whereas everyone
knew well enough that nothing important ever came in it. To prove this
she sketched a rapid and entirely unexciting summary of the six unopened
letters she held.

One of them, she conceded, might be worth reading; and this she laid
aside. Of the remaining five she correctly guessed the contents of four.
Of the fifth she remarked that it would be from a poor feckless dub with
a large family who had owed her three hundred dollars for nine years. She
said it would tell a new hard-luck tale for non-payment of a note now due
for the eighth time. Here she was wrong. The letter inclosed a perfectly
new note for four hundred and fifty dollars; and would Mrs. Pettengill
send on the extra one hundred and fifty dollars that would enable the
debtor to get on his feet and pay all his debts, as there was a good
season of hog buying ahead of him!

"I guessed wrong," admitted the lady. "I certainly did that little man an
injustice, not suspecting he could think up something novel after nine
years." Grimly she scanned the new note. "As good as a treaty with
Germany!" she murmured and threw it aside, though I knew that the old
note and the new hundred and fifty would go forward on the morrow; for
she had spoken again of the debtor's large family. She said it was
wonderful what good breeders the shiftless are.

"Ain't I right, though, about the foolish way people fly at their mail?"
she demanded. "You might think they'd get wise after years and years
of being fooled; but--no, sir! Take me day after to-morrow, when the
next mail comes. I'll fall on it like I fell on this, with all my old
delusions uninjured. There sure does seem to be a lot of human nature
in most of us."

Then she opened the possibly interesting letter that had been put aside.
The envelope, at least, was interesting, bearing as it did the stamp of
a military censor for the American Expedition to France.

"You remember Squat Tyler, that long cow-puncher working for me when you
were here last time?"

I remembered Squat, who was indeed a long cow-puncher--long enough to be
known, also, to his intimates as Timberline.

"Well, Squat is over there in th