away he rides, chuckling like it was an awful joke on us. Not a single scream of agony about what had been done to him with them stunted mules.
Of course that was all I needed to know. One deadly chill of fear took me from head to foot. I knew perfectly well our trench was mined and the fuse lighted. Up comes this chucklehead of a Sawtelle, and for once in his life he's puzzled.
"Well," he says, "you got to give old S.F. credit for one thing. Did you see the way he tried to switch the laugh over on to us, and me with his trusty check right here in my hand? I never would have thought it, but he is certainly one awful good game loser!"
"Game loser nothing!" I says. "He's just a game winner. Any time you see that old boy acting game he's won. And he's won now, no matter how much the known facts look against it. I don't know how, but he's won."
They all begin to tell me I must be mistaken, because look at the price we got for stuff we hadn't been able to sell at any price before. I says I am looking at that, but I'm also obliged to look at Safety after he's paid that price, and the laws of Nature certainly ain't been suspended all at once. I offer to bet 'em what they've made on the deal that Safety has run true to form. "Mark my words," I says, "this is one sad day for the Arrowhead! I don't know how or why, but we'll soon find out; and if you don't believe me, now's the time to double your money."
But they hung off on that. They got too much respect for my judgment. And they admitted that Safety's way of standing the gaff had been downright uncanny. So there was nothing to do but pay over their share of this tainted money and wait for the blow, eight hundred and seventy-five dollars being the amount I split with 'em for their masterly headwork in the depredation.
That very day in the mail comes a letter that has been delayed because this here Government of ours pinches a penny even worse than old Timmins does. Yes, sir; this letter had been mailed at Seattle with a two-cent stamp the day after the Government had boosted the price to three cents. And what does the Government do? Does it say: "Oh, send it along! Why pinch pennies?" Not at all. It takes a printed card and a printed envelope and the time of a clerk and an R.F.D. mail carrier to send me word that I must forward one cent if I want this letter—spends at least two cents to get one cent. Well, it takes two days for that notice to reach me; and of course I let it lie round a couple of days, thinking it's probably an advertisement; and then two days for my one-cent stamp to go back to this parsimonious postmaster; and two days for the letter to get here; making about eight days, during which things had happened that I should of known about. Yes, sir; it's a great Government that will worry over one cent and then meet one of these smooth profiteers and loosen up on a million dollars like a cowhand with three months' pay hitting a wet town. Of course it was all over when I read this letter.
* * * * *
I rolled another cigarette for the injured woman it being no time for words.
"It just goes to show," she observed after the first relishing draft, "that we should be honest, even with defectives like old Timmins. This man in Seattle that keeps track of prices for me writes that the top of the mule market has blown sky-high; that if I got anything looking at all like a mule not to let it go off the place for less than two hundred dollars, because mule buyers is sure desperate. Safety must of got the same tip, only you can bet his correspondent put the full three cents on the letter. Safety would never have trusted a strange postmaster with the excess. Anyway he sold that bunch of rabbits a week later for one hundred and seventy-five a head, thus adding twenty-two hundred and fifty dollars of my money to his tainted fortune. You can imagine the pins and needles he'd been on for a week, scared I'd get the tip and knowing if he even mentioned them runts at any price whatever that I'd be wise at once. That joke of the boys must of seemed heaven-sent to him.
"You ought to heard the lecture I read them fool punchers on common honesty and how the biter is always bit. I scared 'em good; there hasn't been an elephant on the place since that day. They're a chastened lot, all right. I was chastened myself. I admit it. I don't hardly believe I'll ever attempt anything crooked on old Safety again—and yet, I don't know."
The lady viciously expelled the last smoke from her cigarette and again took up the knitting.
"I don't really know but if there was some wanton, duplicity come up that I could handle myself and not have to leave to that pack of amateur thieves out in the bunk house, and it was dead sure and I didn't risk doing more than two years' penal servitude—yes, I really don't know. Even now mebbe all ain't over between us."
II
A LOVE STORY
I had for some time been noting a slight theatrical tinge to the periodical literature supported by the big table in the Arrowhead living room. Chiefly the table's burden is composed of trade journals of the sober quality of the Stockbreeder's Gazette or Mine, Quarry & Derrick or the "Farmer's Almanac." But if, for example, one really tired of a vivacious column headed "Chats on Fertilizers" one could, by shuffling the litter, come upon a less sordid magazine frankly abandoned to the interests of the screen drama.
The one I best recall has limned upon its cover in acceptable flesh tints a fair young face of flawless beauty framed in a mass of curling golden ringlets. The dewy eyes, shaded to mystery by lashes of uncommon length, flash a wistful appeal that is faintly belied by the half-smiling lips and the dimpling chin. The contours are delicate yet firm; a face of haunting appeal—a face in which tears can be seldom but the sprightly rain of April, and the smile, when it melts the sensitive lips, will yet warn that hearts are made to ache and here is one not all too merry in its gladness. It is the face of one of our famous screen beauties, and we know, even from this tinted half-tone, that the fame has been deserved.
On one of those tired Arrowhead nights, inwardly debating the possible discourtesy of an early bedding after ten wet miles of trout stream, I came again and again to this compelling face of the sad smile and the glad tears. It recalled an ideal feminine head much looked at in my nonage. It was lithographed mostly in pink and was labeled "Tempest and Sunshine." So I loitered by the big table, dreaming upon the poignant perfections of this idol of a strange new art. I dreamed until awakened by the bustling return of my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, who paused beside me to build an after-dinner cigarette, herself glancing meantime at the flawless face on the magazine cover. I perceived instantly that she also had been caught by its not too elusive charm.
"A beautiful face," I said.
Ma Pettengill took the magazine from me and studied the dainty thing.
"Yes, he's certainly beautiful," she assented. "He's as handsome as a Greek goddess." Thus did the woman ambiguously praise that famous screen star, J. Harold Armytage. "And the money he makes! His salary is one of them you see compared with the President's so as to make the latter seem a mere trifle. That's a funny thing. I bet at least eighteen million grown people in this country never did know how much they was paying their president till they saw it quoted beside some movie star's salary in a piece that tells how he's getting about four times what we pay the man in the White House. Ain't it a great business, though! Here's this horrible male beauty that would have to be mighty careful to escape extermination if he was anything but an actor. Being that, however, he not only eludes the vengeance of a sickened populace, but he can come out and be raw about it. Here, let me show you."
She turned to the page where J. Harold Armytage began to print a choice few of the letters he daily received from admirers of the reputedly frailer sex. She now read me one of these with lamentable efforts of voice to satirize its wooing
