Somewhere in Red Gap. Harry Leon Wilson

where Wilbur was tripping down from the platform, and Chester had his eyes glazed over on this manicure party. Still, they was gripping each other's hands right there before folks, and I think they're just a bit embarrassed. My old heart went right on echoing that song as I pushed forward—not looking back again, I was that certain.

      "And to show you the mushy state I was in, here is old Safety First himself leering at me down by the door, with a clean shave and his other clothes on, and he says all about how it was a grand evening's musical entertainment and how much will the Belgians get in cold cash, anyway, and how about them hundred and fifty head of bull calves that he was willing to take off my hands, and me, all mushed up by that song as I am telling you, saying to him in a hearty manner, 'They're yours, Dave! Take 'em at your own price, old friend.' Honest, I said it just that way, so you can see. 'Oh, I'll be stuck on 'em at fifty a head,' says Dave, 'but I knew you'd listen to reason, we being such old neighbours.' 'I ain't heard reason since that last song,' I says. I'm listening to my heart, and it's a grand pity yours never learned to talk.' 'Fifty a head,' says the old robber.

      "So, thus throwing away at least fifteen hundred dollars like it was a mere bagatelle or something, I walk out into the romantic night and beat it for home, wanting to be in before my happy couple reached there, so they'd feel free to linger over their parting. My, but I did feel responsible and dangerous, directing human destinies so brashly the way I had."

      There was a pause, eloquent with unworded emotions.

      Then "Human destinies, hell!" the lady at length intoned.

      Hereupon I amazingly saw that she believed her tale to be done. I permitted the silence to go a minute, perhaps, while she fingered the cigarette paper and loose tobacco.

      "And of course, then," I hinted, as the twin jets of smoke were rather viciously expelled.

      "I should say so—'of course, then'—you got it. But I didn't get it for near an hour yet. I set up to my bedroom window in the dark, waiting excitedly, and pretty soon they slowly floated up to the front gate, talking in hushed tones and gurgles. 'Male and female created He them,' I says, flushed with triumph. The moon wasn't up yet, but you hadn't any trouble making out they was such. He was acting outrageously like a male and she was suffering it with the splendid courage which has long distinguished our helpless sex. And there I set, warming my old heart in it and expanding like one of them little squeezed-up sponges you see in the drug-store window which swells up so astonishing when you put it in water. I wasn't impatient for them to quit, oh, no! They seemed to clench and unclench and clench again, as if they had all the time in the world—with me doing nothing but applaud silently.

      "After spending about twenty years out there they loitered softly up the walk and round to the side door where I'd left the light burning, and I slipped over to the side window, which was also open, and looked down on the dim fond pair, and she finally opened the door softly and the light shone out."

      Again Ma Pettengill paused, her elbows on the arms of her chair, her shoulders forward, her gray old head low between them. She drew a long breath and rumbled fiercely:

      "And the mushy fool me, forcing that herd of calves on old Dave at that scandalous price—after all, that's what really gaffed me the worst! My stars! If I could have seen that degenerate old crook again that night—but of course a trade's a trade, and I'd said it. Ain't I the old silly!"

      "The door opened and the light shone out—"

      I gently prompted.

      She erected herself in the chair, threw back her shoulders, and her wide mouth curved and lifted at the corners with the humour that never long deserts this woman.

      "Yep! That light flooded out its golden rays on the reprehensible person of C. Wilbur Todd," she crisply announced. "And like they say in the stories, little remains to be told.

      "I let out a kind of strangled yell, and Wilbur beat it right across my new lawn, and I beat it downstairs. But that girl was like a sleepwalker—not to be talked to, I mean, like you could talk to persons.

      "'Aunty,' she says in creepy tones, 'I have brought myself to the ultimate surrender. I know the chains are about me, already I feel the shackles, but I glory in them.' She kind of gasped and shivered in horrible delight. 'I've kissed the cross at last,' she mutters.

      "I was so weak I dropped into a chair and I just looked at her. At first I couldn't speak, then I saw it was no good speaking. She was free, white, and twenty-one. So I never let on. I've had to take a jolt or two in my time. I've learned how. But finally I did manage to ask how about Chet Timmins.

      "'I wronged dear Chester,' she says. 'I admit it freely. He has a heart of gold and a nature in a thousand. But, of course, there could never be anything between him and a nature like mine; our egos function on different planes,' she says. 'Dear Chester came to see it, too. It's only in the last week we've come to understand each other. It was really that wonderful song that brought us to our mutual knowledge. It helped us to understand our mutual depths better than all the ages of eternity could have achieved.' On she goes with this mutual stuff, till you'd have thought she was reading a composition or something. 'And dear Chester is so radiant in his own new-found happiness,' she says. 'What!' I yells, for this was indeed some jolt.

      "'He has come into his own,' she says. 'They have eloped to Spokane, though I promised to observe secrecy until the train had gone. A very worthy creature I gather from what Chester tells me, a Miss Macgillicuddy—'

      "'Not the manicure party?' I yells again.

      "'I believe she has been a wage-earner,' says Nettie. 'And dear Chester is so grateful about that song. It was her favourite song, too, and it seemed to bring them together, just as it opened my own soul to Wilbur. He says she sings the song very charmingly herself, and he thought it preferable that they be wed in Spokane before his father objected. And oh, aunty, I do see how blind I was to my destiny, and how kind you were to me in my blindness—you who had led the fuller life as I shall lead it at Wilbur's side.'

      "'You beat it to your room,' I orders her, very savage and disorganized. For I had stood about all the jolts in one day that God had meant me to. And so they was married, Chester and his bride attending the ceremony and Oscar Teetz' five-piece orchestra playing the—" She broke off, with a suddenly blazing glance at the disk, and seized it from the table rather purposefully. With a hand firmly at both edges she stared inscrutably at it a long moment.

      "I hate to break the darned thing," she said musingly at last. "I guess I'll just lock it up. Maybe some time I'll be feeling the need to hear it again. I know I can still be had by it if all the circumstances is right."

      Still she stared at the thing curiously.

      "Gee! It was hot getting them calves out to-day, and old Safety First moaning about all over the place how he's being stuck with 'em, till more than once I come near forgetting I was a lady—and, oh, yes"—she brightened—"I was going to tell you. After it was all over, Wilbur, the gallant young tone poet, comes gushing up to me and says, 'Now, aunty, always when you are in town you must drop round and break bread with us.' Aunty, mind you, right off the reel. 'Well,' I says, 'if I drop round to break any bread your wife bakes I'll be sure to bring a hammer.' I couldn't help it. He'll make a home for the girl all right, but he does something sinful to my nerves every time he opens his face. And then coming back here, where I looked for God's peace and quiet, and being made to hear that darned song every time I turned round!

      "I give orders plain enough, but say, it's like a brush fire—you never know when you got it stamped out."

      From the kitchen came the sound of a dropped armful of stove wood. Hard upon this, the unctuous whining tenor of Jimmie Time: