Jimmie Time hereupon behaved craftily. He lifted his head, showing the face of a boy who had somehow got to be seventy years old without ever getting to be more than a boy, and began to whistle softly and innocently--an air of which hardly anything could be definitely said except that it was not "The Rosary." It was very flagrantly not "The Rosary." His craft availed him not. "Yes, and you, too!" thundered the lady. "You was the worst--you was singing. Didn't I hear you? How many times I got to tell you? First thing you know, you little reprobate--" Jimmie Time cowered again. Visibly he took on unbelievable years. "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.