"So they come grouching back to the clubhouse and I took 'em home to breakfast. When we got down to the table old Judge Ballard says: 'What might have been an evening of rare enjoyment was converted into a detestable failure by that cur. I saw from the very beginning that he was determined to spoil our fun.' "'The joke is sure on us,' says Ben Sutton, 'but I bear him no grudge. In fact, I did him an injustice. I knew he wasn't a poet, but I didn't believe he was even a hobo till he jumped that freight.' "Alonzo was out in the hall telephoning Henrietta. We could hear his cheerful voice: 'No, Pettikins, no! It doesn't ache a bit. What's that? Of course I still do! You are the only woman that ever meant anything to me. What? What's that? Oh, I may have errant fancies now and again, like the best of men--you know yourself how sensitive I am to a certain type of flowerlike beauty--but it never touches my deeper nature. Yes, certainly, I shall be right up the very minute good old Ben leaves--to-morrow or next day. What's that? Now, now! Don't do that! Just the minute he leaves--G'--by.' "And the little brute hung up on her!" II MA PETTENGILL AND THE SONG OF SONGS The hammock between the two jack pines at the back of the Arrowhead ranch house had lured me to mid--afternoon slumber. The day was hot and the morning had been toilsome--four miles of trout stream, rocky, difficult miles. And my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, had ridden off after luncheon to some remote fastness of her domain, leaving me and the place somnolent. In the shadowed coolness, aching gratefully in many joints, I had plunged into the hammock's Lethe, swooning shamelessly to a benign oblivion. Dreamless it must long have been, for the shadows of ranch house, stable, hay barn, corral, and bunk house were long to the east when next I observed them. But I fought to this wakefulness through one of those dreams of a monstrous futility that sometimes madden us from sleep. Through a fearsome gorge a stream wound and in it I hunted one certain giant trout. Savagely it took the fly, but always the line broke when I struck; rather, it dissolved; there would be no resistance. And the giant fish mocked me each time, jeered and flouted me, came brazenly to the surface and derided me with antics weirdly human.