he phrase.

"Ain't I got to mend this latigo?" protested Buck Devine piteously.

"You'll go up the gulch and beyond the dry fork and mend it, if you
whistle that tune again!"

Sandy Sawtelle rumpled his pink hair to further disorder and found a few
weak words for his conscious guilt.

"Now, I wasn't aiming to harm anybody, what with with my game laig and
shet up here like I am--"

"Well, my Lord! Can't you play a sensible tune then?"

Jimmie Time hereupon behaved craftily. He lifted his head, showing the
face of a boy who had somehow got to be seventy years old without ever
getting to be more than a boy, and began to whistle softly and
innocently--an air of which hardly anything could be definitely said
except that it was not "The Rosary." It was very flagrantly not "The
Rosary." His craft availed him not.

"Yes, and you, too!" thundered the lady. "You was the worst--you was
singing. Didn't I hear you? How many times I got to tell you? First
thing you know, you little reprobate--"

Jimmie Time cowered again. Visibly he took on unbelievable years.

"Yes, ma'am," he whispered.

"Yes, ma'am," meekly echoed the tottering instrumentalist.

"Yes, ma'am," muttered Buck Devine, "not knowing you was anywheres
near--"

"Makes no difference where I be--you hear me!"

Although her back was toward me I felt her glare. The wretches winced.
She came a dozen steps toward me, then turned swiftly to glare again.
They shuddered, even though she spoke no word. Then she came on,
muttering hotly, and together we approached the ranch house. A dozen
feet from the door she bounded ahead of me with a cry of baffled rage. I
saw why. Lew Wee, unrecking her approach, was cold-bloodedly committing
an encore. She sped through the doorway, and I heard Lew Wee's
frightened squeal as he sped through another. When I stood in the room
she was putting violent hands to the throat of the thing.

"The hours I spend with th--" The throttled note expired in a very
dreadful squawk of agony. It was as if foul murder had been done, and
done swiftly. The maddened woman faced me with the potentially evil disk
clutched in her hands. In a voice that is a notable loss to our revivals
of Greek tragedy she declaimed:

"Ain't it the limit?--and the last thing I done was to hide out that
record up behind the clock where he couldn't find it!"

In a sudden new alarm and with three long steps she reached the door of
the kitchen and flung it open. Through a