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Updated: June 13, 2025
It's ten o'clock. Don't them little white-faced beauties make the music! Honestly I'd like to have a cot out in the corral. We miss a lot of it in here." Sunday and a driving rain had combined to keep Ma Pettengill within the Arrowhead ranch house. Neither could have done this alone.
Ma Pettengill detected coyotes at the far edges of fields so far that I would have ignored them for jack rabbits had I observed them at all. I claimed an occasional close one; but these were few. The outlook was again not cheering. It was an excellent morning for distant coyotes, and presently I owed Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill seven dollars, she having won two doubleheaders in succession.
It was the photograph of a handsome young woman in the voluminous riding skirt of years gone by, before the side-saddle became extinct. She held a crop and wore an astoundingly plumed bonnet. Despite the offensive disguise, one saw provocation for the course adopted by the late Lysander John Pettengill at about that period. "Very well now get me here, after I'd been on the ranch only a month."
Even the youngest, known as Sissy Atterbury, aged eight and looking younger, despite her gray coating of powdered alkali, had tenaciously held out for a grown man's pay, which made her something even worse than a Bolshevik; it made her an I.W.W. But, as Ma Pettengill said, what could a lady do when Fate had a stranglehold on her.
Lysander John Pettengill, who was spurring her jaded roan up the long rise from the creek bottom. My stalwart hostess, entirely masculine to the eye from a little distance, strode up from the corral, waved a quirt at me in greeting, indicated by another gesture that she was dusty and tired, and vanished briskly within the ranch house.
Pettengill, in khaki riding breeches, flannel shirt, and the hat of her trade, towered bulkily as an admirable figure of wrath, one hand on her hip, one poising a quirt viciously aloft.
There were actually tradesmen who seemed to matter enormously; on the other hand, there were those of undoubted qualifications, like Mrs. Pettengill, for example, and Cousin Egbert, who deliberately chose not to matter, and mingled as freely with the Bohemian set as they did with the county families. Thus one could never be quite certain whom one was meeting. There was the Tuttle person.
And I knew she would be addressing one Homer Gale, temporary riding boss of the Arrowhead. Indeed, Homer's slightly pleading accents were now very colourably imitated by his embittered employer: "Yes'm, Mis' Pettengill, it's a matter of life and death; no less. I got to git off for two days a matter of life and death. Yes'm; I just got to!"
I looked respectfully again at the bulky creatures, though listening, too, for the stealthy-stepping Lew Wee; a day in the thin spring air along a rocky trout stream had made even cattle on the hoof suggestive. Ma Pettengill, with a last proud look at her jewels, swept the panoramic camera of her eye round to the blacksmith shop on our right.
Ma Pettengill, arrayed in olive-drab shirt and breeches, leather puttees, and the wide-brimmed hat of her calling with the four careful dents in the top, observed me with friendly curiosity as she ties a corduroy coat to the back of her saddle. Hereupon I explained my tactful handling of the reputed cinch binder.
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