victim of
their operation."

"Yes, that's quite true, in drawing-rooms," he airily amended. "But
this is God's open and untrammeled prairie."

"Where crudeness is king," I added.

"Where candor is worth more than convention," he corrected, with
rather a wistful look in his eye. "And where we mortals ought to be at
least as urbane as that really wonderful robin-egg sky up there with
the chinook arch across it."

He wasn't flippant any more, and I had a sense of triumph in forcing
his return to sobriety. I wanted to ask him what his name was, once we
were back to earth again. But as that seemed a little too direct, I
merely inquired where his home happened to be.

"I've just come from up North!" he said. And that, I promptly
realized, was an evasive way of answering an honest question,
especially as there was a California license-number on the front of
his car.

"And what's your business?" I inquired, deciding to try him out with
still one more honest question.

"I'm a windmill man," he told me, as he waded in toward his
dejected-looking automobile and lifted up its hood. I took him
literally, for there wasn't anything, at the time, to make me think of
Cervantes. But I'd already noticed his hands, and I felt sure they
weren't the hands of a laboring man. They were long and lean and
finicky-fingered hands, the sort that could span an octave much better
than they could hold a hayfork. And I decided to see him hoisted by
his own petard.

"Then you're just the man I'm looking for," I told him. He stopped for
a moment to look up from the bit of heavy rubber-hose he was winding
with a stretch of rubber that looked as though it had been cut from an
inner tube.

"Words such as those are honey to my ears," he said as he went on with
his work. And I saw it was necessary to yank him down to earth again.

"I've a broken-down windmill over on my ranch," I told him. "And if
you're what you say you are, you ought to be able to put it in running
order for me."

"Then you've a ranch?" he observed, stopping in his work.

"A ranch and a husband and three children," I told him with the
well-paraded air of a tabby-cat who's dragged her last mouse into the
drawing-room. But my announcement didn't produce the effect I'd
counted on. All I could see on the face of the windmill man was a sort
of mild perplexity.

"That only deepens the mystery," he observed, apparently as much to
himself as to me.

"What mystery?" I asked.