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Updated: June 13, 2025
I dropped delicately a few paces behind, unnoticed, I thought; but Ma Pettengill waited for me to overtake her again. Then, as we pushed through the dust together, she told me that her days were swifter than a weaver's shuttle and spent without hope. If it wasn't one thing it was another.
Whereupon the yarn was laid by while Ma Pettengill eagerly shuffled the letters. She thought fit to extenuate this eagerness. She said if people lived forever they would still get foolishly excited over their mail; whereas everyone knew well enough that nothing important ever came in it. To prove this she sketched a rapid and entirely unexciting summary of the six unopened letters she held.
"Well, then, we can get on with this mystery." So Ma Pettengill said we could; and we did indeed. This here chink seems to of been a carefree child up to the time the civilized world went crazy with a version for him. He was a good cook and had a good job at a swell country club down the peninsula from San Francisco.
"Why, wasn't that too bad!" said Ma Pettengill. "Can happen!" said Lew Wee positively. "Too bad!" said Ma Pettengill again. "I send him nine hundred dollars your money. Money burn, too," said Lew Wee. "Now, now! Well, that certainly is too bad! What a shame!" "Can happen!" affirmed Lew Wee. It was colourless. He was not treating his loss lightly nor yet was he bewailing it.
Pettengill will give him her word of honour to go on the witness stand and perjure herself to this effect then he don't see no use of even putting Kulanche County, State of Washington, to the expense of a trial, the said county already being deep in the hole for its new courthouse but for mercy's sake to stop the old idiot babbling about his brother-in-law, that every one knows he never had one, because such a joke is too great an affront to the dignity of the law in such cases made and provided to wit: tell the old fool to say nothing except 'No, he never done it. And he shakes hands with me, too, and says he'll have an important talk with Myron Bughalter, the sheriff.
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.
So it befell that not until we sat out for a splendid sunset that evening did I learn in an orderly manner of Postlethwaite vicissitudes. Ma Pettengill built her first cigarette with tender solicitude; and this, in consideration of her day's hard ride, I permitted her to burn in relaxed silence.
On the shaded side piazza of the ranch house I could discern my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill; she sat erect, even in a rocking-chair, and knitted. On the kitchen steps, full in the westering sun, sat the Chinese chef of the Arrowhead, and knitted a yellow, smoothly running automaton.
As recreation it was blighting; and I said almost as much. Ma Pettengill was deaf to it, her gray head in its broad-brimmed hat sternly bowed in meditation as she wove to her horse's motion. Then I became aware that she talked to another; one who was not there. She said things I was sure he would not have liked to hear.
Ma Pettengill said she must see this here Tilton and this here Snell, and have that two hundred yards of fence built like they had agreed to, as man to man; and no more of this here nonsense of putting it off from day to day. She was going to talk straight to them because, come Thursday, she had to turn a herd of beef cattle into that field.
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