ride myself. I suggested that at the next ranch we
passed we should stop and set fire to the haystacks, just to crown the
day's brutalities with something really splendid. I also said I was
starving to death in a land of plenty.

Ma Pettengill gazed aloft at the sun and said it was half-past twelve.
I looked at my watch and said the sun was over ten minutes slow, which
was probably due to the heavy continuous gunfire on the Western Front.
This neat bit went for just nothing. As we rode on I fondly recalled that
last cold hot cake which Sandy Sawtelle had sacrificed to his gift for
debased whimsy. I also recalled other items of that gloomy repast,
wondering how I could so weakly have quit when I did.

We rode now under a sun that retained its old fervour if not its
velocity. We traversed an endless lane between fields, in one of which
grazed a herd of the Arrowhead cattle. These I was made to contemplate
for many valuable moments. I had to be told that I was regarding the
swallow-fork herd, pure-breds that for one reason or another--the chief
being careless help--had not been registered. The omission was denoted
by the swallow fork in the left ear.

The owner looked upon them with fond calculation. She was fondly
calculating that they would have been worth about fifty per cent. more
to her with ears unmutilated. She grew resentful that their true worth
should not be acclaimed by the world. In the sight of heaven they were
pure-breds; so why should they suffer through the oversight of a herd
boss that hadn't anywhere near such distinguished ancestry? And so on,
as the lady says.

We left the lane at last and were on the county road, but headed away
from the Arrowhead and food. No doubt there remained other homes for us
to wreck. We mounted a rise and the road fell from us in a long, gentle
slope. And then a mile beyond, where the slope ended, I beheld a most
inviting tiny pleasance in this overwhelming welter of ranch land, with
its more or less grim business of cattle.

It was a little homestead fit to adorn an art calendar to be entitled
Peace and Plenty--a veritable small farm from some softer little country
far to the east. It looked strangely lost amid these bleaker holdings.
There was a white little house and it sported nothing less than green
blinds. There was a red barn, with toy outbuildings. There was a
vegetable garden, an orchard of blossoming fruit trees, and, in front of
the glistening little house, a