for him with a knife. And yet Herman seemed so silly!
First thing when he got on the place he wanted to know where the engine
was that pumped the windmill.

Furthermore, if you ask me, that there wine won't be made safe for
democracy until Uncle Henry has been years and years laid away to rest.

XI

CURLS

Ma Pettengill, long morose, for months made hostile of mood by the
shortage of help, now bubbled with a strange vivacity. At her desk in the
Arrowhead living room she cheerfully sorted a jumble of befigured sheets
and proclaimed to one and all that the Arrowhead ranch was once more a
going concern. She'd thought it was gone, and here it was merely going.
She would no longer be compelled to stare ruin in the face till it
actually got embarrassed and had to look the other way. And it was the
swift doings of this here new foreman. He'd not only got us going again
but had put us on a military basis. And at that he was nothing but a poor
old wreck of a veteran from the trenches, aged all of twenty-one, shot to
pieces, gassed, shell-shocked, trench feeted and fevered, and darned bad
with nervous dyspepsia into the bargain.

Thus described, the bargain seemed to me to be a poor one, for I had not
yet viewed this decrepit newcomer or been refreshed with tales of his
prowess. But Ma Pettengill knows men, and positively will not bubble
except under circumstances that justify it, so I considered the matter
worth a question or two.

Very well then! What about this mere shattered bit of flotsam from the
world welter? How could so misused a remnant cope with the manifold cares
of the long-harried Arrowhead ranch?

Why, he just plain coped, that was all. He might be mere shattered
flotsam, but you bet he was still some little coper, take her word for
that! Matter of fact, though, he didn't aim to hold the job for long.
Only until this here smarty of a medical officer, that turned him down
from going back to the trenches, was retired to private life again.
This here new foreman had to be on the ground when this puppet got
out of his uniform and so could be handled proper by the right party
without incurring twenty years in Leavenworth. At this brief meeting the
unfortunate man would be told politely that he had guessed wrong on the
foreman's physical condition, after which the same would be proved to
him then and there, leaving him to wish that he hadn't been so arrogant
telling parties they was unfit for further ser