Part 3 (2/2)

”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 window thus exposed we beheld the offender. One so seldom thinks of the Chinese as athletes! Lew Wee was well down the flat toward the cottonwoods and still going strong.

”Ain't it the limit?” again demanded his employer. ”Gosh all--excuse me, but they got me into such a state. Here I am panting like a tuckered hound. And now I got to make the tea myself. He won't dare come back before suppertime.”

It seemed to be not yet an occasion for words from me. I tried for a look of intelligent sympathy. In the kitchen I heard her noisily fill a teakettle with water. She was not herself yet. She still muttered hotly.

I moved to the magazine--littered table and affected to be taken with the portrait of a smug--looking prize Holstein on the first page of the _Stock Breeder's Gazette_.

The volcano presently seethed through the room and entered its own apartment.

Ten minutes later my hostess emerged with recovered aplomb. She had donned a skirt and a flowered blouse, and dusted powder upon and about her sunburned and rather blobby nose. Her crinkly gray hair had been drawn to a knot at the back of her grenadier's head. Her widely set eyes gleamed with the smile of her broad and competent mouth.

”Tea in one minute,” she promised more than audibly as she bustled into the kitchen. It really came in five, and beside the tray she pleasantly relaxed. The cups were filled and a breach was made upon the cake she had brought. The tea was advertising a sufficient strength, yet she now raised the dynamics of her own portion.

”I'll just spill a hooker of this here Scotch into mine,” she said, and then, as she did even so: ”My lands! Ain't I the cynical old Kate! And silly! Letting them boys upset me that way with that there fool song.”

She decanted a saucerful of the re-enforced tea and raised it to her pursed lips. ”Looking at you!” she murmured cavernously and drank deep.

She put the saucer back where nice persons leave theirs at all times.

”Say, it was hot over on that bench to-day. I was getting out that bunch of bull calves, and all the time here was old Safety First mumbling round--”

This was rather promising, but I had resolved differently.

”That song,” I insinuated. ”Of course there are people--”

”You bet there are! I'm one of 'em, too! What that song's done to me--and to other innocent bystanders in the last couple weeks--”

She sighed hugely, drank more of the fortified brew--nicely from the cup this time--and fas.h.i.+oned a cigarette from materials at her hand.

In the flame of a lighted match Mrs. Pettengill's eyes sparkled with a kind of savage retrospection. She shrugged it off impatiently.

”I guess you thought I spoke a mite short when you asked about Nettie's wedding yesterday.”

It was true. She had turned the friendly inquiry with a rather mystifying abruptness. I murmured politely. She blew twin jets of smoke from the widely separated corners of her generous mouth and then shrewdly narrowed her gaze to some distant point of narration.

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