y is over. I again lead the dangerous beast--

"What you humouring that old skate for?"

Ma Pettengill, arrayed in olive-drab shirt and breeches, leather puttees,
and the wide-brimmed hat of her calling with the four careful dents in
the top, observed me with friendly curiosity as she ties a corduroy coat
to the back of her saddle.

Hereupon I explained my tactful handling of the reputed cinch binder. It
evoked the first cheerful sound I had heard that day:

Ma Pettengill laughed heartily.

"That old hair trunk never had the jazz to be any cinch binder. Who told
you he was?"

I named names--all I could remember. Almost everyone on the ranch had
passed me the friendly warning, and never had I saddled the brute without
a thrill.

"Sure! Them chuckleheads always got to tell everybody something. It's
a wonder they ain't sent you in to the Chink to borrow his meat auger,
or out to the blacksmith shop for a left-handed monkey wrench, or
something. Come on!"

So that was it! Just another bit of stale ranch humour--alleged
humour--as if it could be at all funny to have me saddle this wreck
with the tenderest solicitude morning after morning!

"Just one moment!" I said briskly.

I think Dandy Jim realized that everything of a tender nature between
us was over. Some curious and quite charming respect I had been wont
to show him was now gone out of my manner. He began to do deep breathing
exercises before I touched the cinch. I pulled with the strength of a
fearless man. Dandy Jim forthwith inflated his chest like a gentleman
having his photograph taken in a bathing suit. I waited, apparently
foiled. I stepped back, spoke to Ma Pettengill of the day's promise,
and seemed carelessly to forget what I was there for. Slowly Dandy Jim
deflated himself; and then, on the fair and just instant, I pulled.
I pulled hard and long. The game was won. Dandy Jim had now the waist
of that matron wearing the Sveltina corset, over in the part of the
magazine where the stories die away. I fearlessly bestrode him and
the day was on.

I opened something less than a hundred gates, so that we could take our
way through the lower fields. Ma Pettengill said she must see this here
Tilton and this here Snell, and have that two hundred yards of fence
built like they had agreed to, as man to man; and no more of this here
nonsense of putting it off from day to day.

She was going to talk straight to them because, come Thursday, she had
to turn