f you;
It's those who love you that have to pay....

It was the wail of one thwarted and perishing. "Ain't it the sobbing
tenor?" remarked his employer. "But you can't blame him after the
killing he made before. Of course he'll get to town sooner or later and
play this fourteen number, being that the new reform administration,
with Lon Price as Mayor, is now safely elected and the game has opened
up again. Yes, sir; he's nutty about stitches in a mule. I wouldn't put
it past him that he had old Jerry kicked on purpose to-day!"

VII

KATE; OR, UP FROM THE DEPTHS

This day I fared abroad with Ma Pettengill over wide spaces of the
Arrowhead Ranch. Between fields along the river bottom were gates
distressingly crude; clumsy, hingeless panels of board fence, which I
must dismount and lift about by sheer brawn of shoulder. Such gates
combine the greatest weight with the least possible exercise of man's
inventive faculties, and are named, not too subtly, the Armstrong gate.
This, indeed, is the American beauty of ranch humour, a flower of
imperishable fragrance handed to the visitor--who does the lifting with
guarded drollery or triumphant snicker, as may be. Buck Devine or Sandy
Sawtelle will achieve the mot with an aloof austerity that abates no jot
unto the hundredth repetition; while Lew Wee, Chinese cook of the
Arrowhead, fails not to brighten it with a nervous giggle, impairing its
vocal correctness, moreover, by calling it the "Armcatchum" gate.

Ma Pettengill was more versatile this day. The first gate I struggled
with she called Armstrong in a manner dryly descriptive; for the second
she managed a humorous leer to illumine the term; for the third,
secured with a garland of barbed wire that must be painfully untwisted,
she employed a still broader humour. Even a child would then have known
that calling this criminal device the Armstrong gate was a joke of
uncommon richness.

As I remounted, staunching the inevitable wound from barbed wire, I
began to speak in the bitterly superior tones of an efficiency expert as
we traversed a field where hundreds of white-faced Herefords were
putting on flesh to their own ruin. I said to my hostess that I vastly
enjoyed lifting a hundred-pound gate--and what was the loss of a little
blood between old friends, even when aggravated by probable tetanus
germs? But had she ever paused to compute the money value of time lost
by her henchmen in dismounting to open these c