With drawn and ashen face Mr. Sawtelle received back his knitting.  His pose was to appear vastly preoccupied and deaf to insult.  He was still counting stitches as he turned away and clattered down the steps.

“Say!” called his employer.  Sandy turned.

“Yes, ma’am!”

“You seen the party that stopped here this morning in that big, pompous touring car?”

“No, ma’am!”

“They was after mules.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“They offered me five hundred dollars a span for mine.”

“No, ma’am—­I mean, yes, ma’am!”

“That’s all.  I thought you’d rejoice to know it.”  The lady turned to me as if Mr. Sawtelle had left us.  “Yes, sir; he’d make you die laughing with some of his pranks, that madcap would.  I tell you, when he begins cutting up—­”

But Mr. Sawtelle was leaving us rapidly.  His figure seemed to be drawn in, as if he would appear smaller to us.  Ma Pettengill seized her own knitting once more, stared grimly at it, then stared grimly down at the bunk house, within which her victim had vanished.  A moment later she was pouring tobacco from a cloth sack into a brown cigarette paper.  She drew the string of the sack—­one end between her teeth—­rolled the cigarette with one swift motion and, as she waited the blaze of her match, remarked that they had found a substitute for everything but the mule.  The cigarette lighted, she burned at least a third of its length in one vast inhalation, which presently caused twin jets of smoke to issue from the rather widely separated corners of a generous mouth.  Upon which she remarked that old Safety First Timmins was a game winner, about the gamest winner she’d ever lost to.

Three other mighty inhalations and the cigarette was done.  Again she took up the knitting, pausing for but one brief speech before the needles began their shrewd play.  This concerned the whale.  She said the whale was the noblest beast left to us in all the animal kingdom and would vanish like the buffalo if treated as food.  She said it was shameful to reduce this majestic creature of the deep to the dimensions of a chafing dish and a three-cornered slice of toast.  Then she knitted.

She had left numerous openings; some humorous emprise of Sandy Sawtelle, presumably distressing; the gameness of one Timmins as a winner; the whale as a food animal; the spectacular price of mules broken to harness.  Rather than choose blindly among them I spoke of my day’s fishing.  Departing at sunrise I had come in with a bounteous burden of rainbow trout, which I now said would prove no mean substitute for meat at the evening meal.