Sawtelle received back his knitting. His
pose was to appear vastly preoccupied and deaf to insult. He was still
counting stitches as he turned away and clattered down the steps.

"Say!" called his employer. Sandy turned.

"Yes, ma'am!"

"You seen the party that stopped here this morning in that big, pompous
touring car?"

"No, ma'am!"

"They was after mules."

"Yes, ma'am!"

"They offered me five hundred dollars a span for mine."

"No, ma'am--I mean, yes, ma'am!"

"That's all. I thought you'd rejoice to know it." The lady turned to me
as if Mr. Sawtelle had left us. "Yes, sir; he'd make you die laughing
with some of his pranks, that madcap would. I tell you, when he begins
cutting up--"

But Mr. Sawtelle was leaving us rapidly. His figure seemed to be drawn
in, as if he would appear smaller to us. Ma Pettengill seized her own
knitting once more, stared grimly at it, then stared grimly down at the
bunk house, within which her victim had vanished. A moment later she was
pouring tobacco from a cloth sack into a brown cigarette paper. She drew
the string of the sack--one end between her teeth--rolled the cigarette
with one swift motion and, as she waited the blaze of her match, remarked
that they had found a substitute for everything but the mule. The
cigarette lighted, she burned at least a third of its length in one vast
inhalation, which presently caused twin jets of smoke to issue from the
rather widely separated corners of a generous mouth. Upon which she
remarked that old Safety First Timmins was a game winner, about the
gamest winner she'd ever lost to.

Three other mighty inhalations and the cigarette was done. Again she took
up the knitting, pausing for but one brief speech before the needles
began their shrewd play. This concerned the whale. She said the whale
was the noblest beast left to us in all the animal kingdom and would
vanish like the buffalo if treated as food. She said it was shameful to
reduce this majestic creature of the deep to the dimensions of a chafing
dish and a three-cornered slice of toast. Then she knitted.

She had left numerous openings; some humorous emprise of Sandy Sawtelle,
presumably distressing; the gameness of one Timmins as a winner; the
whale as a food animal; the spectacular price of mules broken to harness.
Rather than choose blindly among them I spoke of my day's fishing.
Departing at sunrise I had come in with a bounteous burden of rainbow
trout, which I now sai