If Jimsy had any hypothesis to offer then, he did not offer it, and before he had reached the corral May appeared. I’ll not report her talk this time, it was the usual nursery governess affair: did Jimsy know that he had wasted half an hour when he ought to have hitched up and gone for wood up Dead Timber Creek, and didn’t he know there was wood for just one day left and it would take him the whole day? I escaped to my fishing before she had done and I took my dinner with Scipio. It is wicked to fish in October, but we ate the trout; and I must tell you of a discovery: when artificial flies fail, and frost has finished the grasshoppers, the housefly is a deadly bait! I am glad at last to have accounted for the presence of the housefly in a universe of infinite love. At supper I was sorry that Scipio and I had not got off to the mountains that day. Jimsy was still out. He had brought, it appeared, one load of wood from Dead Timber Creek and had gone for another. It was May’s opinion that he should have returned by now. I hardly thought so, but this made small difference to May. She was up from table and listening at the open door three times before our restless meal was over. Next she lighted a lantern and hung it out upon a gate-post of one of the outer corrals, that Jimsy might be guided home from afar. In the following thirty minutes she went out twice again to listen and soon after this she sent me out to the lantern to make sure it was burning brightly. “He would see the windows at any rate,” I told her. But now she had begun to be frightened and could not sit in her chair for more than a few moments at a time. “What o’clock is it?” she asked me. It was seven forty-five and I think she fancied it was midnight. If Jimsy had been six years old and a perfect fool to boot she could not have been more distracted than she presently became. “Why, Mrs. Culloden,” I remonstrated, “Jimsy was raised in this valley. He knows his way about.” She did not hear me and now she seized the telephone. Into the ears of one neighbor after another she poured questions up and down the valley. It was idle to remind her that Dead Timber Creek was five miles to the south of us and that the Whitlows, who lived six miles to the north, were not likely to have seen Jimsy. The whole valley quickly learned that he had not come back with his second load of wood by eight o’clock and that she was asking them all if they knew anything about it. In the space of twenty minutes with the telephone she had made him ridiculous throughout the precinct; and then at ten minutes past eight, while she was ringing up her friend Mrs. Sedlaw for the second time, in came Jimsy. The wood and the wagon were safe in the corral, he was safe in the house and hungry; and, of course, she hadn’t heard him arrive because of the noise of the telephone. He had been at the stable for the last ten minutes, attending to the horses. “And you never had the sense to tell me!” she cried.