oet, but I didn't
believe he was even a hobo till he jumped that freight.'

"Alonzo was out in the hall telephoning Henrietta. We could hear his
cheerful voice: 'No, Pettikins, no! It doesn't ache a bit. What's that?
Of course I still do! You are the only woman that ever meant anything to
me. What? What's that? Oh, I may have errant fancies now and again, like
the best of men--you know yourself how sensitive I am to a certain type
of flowerlike beauty--but it never touches my deeper nature. Yes,
certainly, I shall be right up the very minute good old Ben
leaves--to-morrow or next day. What's that? Now, now! Don't do that!
Just the minute he leaves--G'--by.'

"And the little brute hung up on her!"

II

MA PETTENGILL AND THE SONG OF SONGS

The hammock between the two jack pines at the back of the Arrowhead
ranch house had lured me to mid--afternoon slumber. The day was hot and
the morning had been toilsome--four miles of trout stream, rocky,
difficult miles. And my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, had
ridden off after luncheon to some remote fastness of her domain, leaving
me and the place somnolent.

In the shadowed coolness, aching gratefully in many joints, I had
plunged into the hammock's Lethe, swooning shamelessly to a benign
oblivion. Dreamless it must long have been, for the shadows of ranch
house, stable, hay barn, corral, and bunk house were long to the east
when next I observed them. But I fought to this wakefulness through one
of those dreams of a monstrous futility that sometimes madden us from
sleep. Through a fearsome gorge a stream wound and in it I hunted one
certain giant trout. Savagely it took the fly, but always the line broke
when I struck; rather, it dissolved; there would be no resistance. And
the giant fish mocked me each time, jeered and flouted me, came
brazenly to the surface and derided me with antics weirdly human.

Then, as I persisted, it surprisingly became a musical trout. It
whistled, it played a guitar, it sang. How pathetic our mildly amazed
acceptance of these miracles in dreams! I was only the more determined
to snare a fish that could whistle and sing simultaneously, and
accompany itself on a stringed instrument, and was six feet in length.
It was that by now and ever growing. It seemed only an attractive
novelty and I still believed a brown hackle would suffice. But then I
became aware that this trout, to its stringed accompaniment, ever
whistled and sang on