and a theatre
open to the heavens. I could feel the terror of the aged vassal.

"Yes, ma'am!" The tone crawled abasingly. "I forgot myself."

I was glad, and I dare say he had the wit to be, that he had not to face
the menace of her glare.

III

THE REAL PERUVIAN DOUGHNUTS

The affairs of Arrowhead Ranch are administered by its owner, Mrs.
Lysander John Pettengill, through a score or so of hired experts. As a
trout-fishing guest of the castle I found the retainers of this
excellent feudalism interesting enough and generally explicable. But
standing out among them, both as a spectacle and by reason of his
peculiar activities, is a shrunken little man whom I would hear
addressed as Jimmie Time. He alone piqued as well as interested. There
was a tang to all the surmises he prompted in me.

I have said he is a man; but wait! The years have had him, have scoured
and rasped and withered him; yet his face is curiously but the face of a
boy, his eyes but the fresh, inquiring, hurt eyes of a boy who has been
misused for years threescore. Time has basely done all but age him. So
much for the wastrel as Nature has left him. But Art has furthered the
piquant values of him as a spectacle.

In dress, speech, and demeanour Jimmie seems to be of the West,
Western--of the old, bad West of informal vendetta, when a man's
increase of years might lie squarely on his quickness in the "draw";
when he went abundantly armed by day and slept lightly at
night--trigger fingers instinctively crooked. Of course such days have
very definitely passed; wherefore the engaging puzzle of certain
survivals in Jimmie Time--for I found him still a two-gun man. He wore
them rather consciously sagging from his lean hips--almost pompously, it
seemed. Nor did he appear properly unconscious of his remaining
attire--of the broad-brimmed hat, its band of rattlesnake skin; of the
fringed buckskin shirt, opening gallantly across his pinched throat; of
his corduroy trousers, fitting bedraggled; of his beautiful beaded
moccasins.

He was perfect in detail--and yet he at once struck me as being too
acutely aware of himself. Could this suspicion ensue, I wondered, from
the circumstance that the light duties he discharged in and about the
Arrowhead Ranch house were of a semidomestic character; from a marked
incongruity in the sight of him, full panoplied for homicide, bearing
armfuls of wood to the house; or, with his wicked hat pulled desperately
ove