"It was some job. These hinges was riveted on and didn't come loose easy. The rear of that trunk must of been one sad mutilation. It probably won't ever again be the trunk it once was. Abner had to hustle to get through in one day. I wish I could get the old hound to work for me that way. They'd just got the trunk back when I rode in that night. It was nervy, all right! I asked her if she wasn't afraid he would see the many traces of this rough work she had done.
"'Not a chance on earth!' says Lydia. 'I knew he would never look at any place but the front. He has the mind of a true scientist. It wouldn't occur to him in a million years that there is any other way but the front way to get into a trunk. I painted over the rivets and the bruises as well as I could, but I'm sure he will never look there. He may notice it by accident in the years to come, but the poor chap will then have other worries, I hope.'
"Such was the chit. I don't know. Mebbe woman has her place in the great world after all. Anyway, she'll be a help to Oswald. Whatever he ain't she is."
VII
CHANGE OF VENUS
Ma Pettengill and I rode labouring horses up a steep way between two rocky hillsides that doubled the rays of the high sun back upon us and smothered the little breeze that tried to follow us up from the flat lands of the Arrowhead. We breathed the pointed smell of the sage and we breathed the thick, hot dust that hung lazily about us; a dust like powdered chocolate, that cloyed and choked.
As recreation it was blighting; and I said almost as much. Ma Pettengill was deaf to it, her gray head in its broad-brimmed hat sternly bowed in meditation as she wove to her horse's motion. Then I became aware that she talked to another; one who was not there. She said things I was sure he would not have liked to hear. She hung choice insults upon his name and blistered his fair repute with calumnies. She was a geyser of invective, quiet perhaps for fifty yards, then grandly in action.
"Call yourself a cowman, hey? What you ought to be is matron of a foundling asylum. Yes, sir!"
This was among the least fearful of her dusty scornings. And I knew she would be addressing one Homer Gale, temporary riding boss of the Arrowhead. Indeed, Homer's slightly pleading accents were now very colourably imitated by his embittered employer:
"Yes'm, Mis' Pettengill, it's a matter of life and death; no less. I got to git off for two days—a matter of life and death. Yes'm; I just got to!"