ggered from the bunk house in his fearsome regalia. Under
the awed observation of Boogles he wheeled, drew, and shot from the hip
one who had cravenly sought to attack him from the rear.

"My, but he's hostile!" murmured my hostess. "Ain't he just the hostile
little wretch?"

IV

ONCE A SCOTCHMAN, ALWAYS

Terrific sound waves beat upon the Arrowhead ranch house this night. At
five o'clock a hundred and twenty Hereford calves had been torn from
their anguished mothers for the first time and shut into a too adjacent
feeding pen. Mothers and offspring, kept a hundred yards apart by two
stout fences, unceasingly bawled their grief, a noble chorus of yearning
and despair. The calves projected a high, full-throated barytone, with
here and there a wailing tenor against the rumbling bass of their dams.
And ever and again pealed distantly into the chorus the flute obbligato
of an emotional coyote down on the flat. There was never a diminuendo.
The fortissimo had been steadily maintained for three hours and would
endure the night long, perhaps for two other nights.

At eight o'clock I sleepily wondered how I should sleep. And thus
wondering, I marvelled at the indifference to the racket of my hostess,
Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill. Through dinner and now as she read a San
Francisco newspaper she had betrayed no consciousness of it. She read
her paper and from time to time she chuckled.

"How do you like it?" I demanded, referring to the monstrous din.

"It's great," she said, plainly referring to something else. "One of
them real upty-up weddings in high life, with orchestras and bowers of
orchids and the bride a vision of loveliness--"

"I mean the noise."

"What noise?" She put the paper aside and stared at me, listening
intently. I saw that she was honestly puzzled, even as the chorus
swelled to unbelievable volume. I merely waved a hand. The coyote was
then doing a most difficult tremolo high above the clamour.

"Oh, that!" said my enlightened hostess. "That's nothing; just a little
bunch of calves being weaned. We never notice that--and say, they got
the groom's mother in here, too. Yes, sir, Ellabelle in all her tiaras
and sunbursts and dog collars and diamond chest protectors--Mrs. Angus
McDonald, mother of groom, in a stunning creation! I bet they didn't
need any flashlight when they took her, not with them stones all over
her person. They could have took her in a coal cellar."

"How do you expect to