Ma Pettengill

by Harry Leon Wilson

On the completion of this a hoarse hoot of scorn boomed through the haze and Homer was told that men like himself often caused perfectly decent people to be tried for murder. And again Homer's rightful job was echoed as "Matron of a foundling asylum!"

I felt the embarrassment of one unwittingly come upon the adjustment of a private grievance. I dropped delicately a few paces behind, unnoticed, I thought; but Ma Pettengill waited for me to overtake her again.

Then, as we pushed through the dust together, she told me that her days were swifter than a weaver's shuttle and spent without hope. If it wasn't one thing it was another. What she'd like—she'd like to wake up in a strange place and find she'd clean forgot her name and address, like these here parties you read about in the papers. And why wouldn't she? A dry year; feed short on the range; water holes dusty that never did go dry before; half a hay crop and winter threatening right spang in the summertime! Think of having to gather cattle off the range in the middle of August when other times you could let 'em run till the middle of October! In fact, this was the kind of a year that cattle raisers had a technical term for. It was known technically as one hell of a year, if I wanted to be told.

And having to do the work with mental defectives and cripples and Bolsheviki, because every able-bodied puncher in the country had gone over to create a disturbance in Europe! Hadn't she combed out the county hospital and poor farm to get a haying crew? Didn't the best cowboy now on the pay roll wear a derby hat and ride a motorcycle by preference? And paying seventy-five dollars to these imitation punchers to fight her gentle saddle horses, no colt, it seemed, having been ridden on the place in the memory of man.

She didn't know; taking one thing with another, sometimes she almost wished that the world was going to stay unsafe for democracy.

Of course this technically described bad year wasn't so bad one way, because the sheepmen would sure get a tasty wallop, sheep being mighty informal about dying with the weather below zero and scant feed. When cattle wasn't hardly feeling annoyed sheep would lie down and quit intruding on honest cattle raisers for all time. Just a little attention from a party with a skinning knife was all they needed after that. And so on, back to Homer Gale, who had gone to Red Gap for two days on a matter of life and death—and of this the less repeated here the better.

Now our narrow way spread to a valley where the sun's rays were more widely diffused and the dust less pervasive. We could see a mile ahead to a vaster cloud of dust. This floated over a band of Arrowhead cattle being driven in from a range no longer sustaining. They were being driven by Bolsheviki, so my informant disclosed.

We halted above the road and waited for the dusty creatures to plod by us down to the pleasant lea where feed was still to be had and water was sweet. Then came the Bolshevik rear guard. It consisted of Silas Atterbury and four immature grandchildren.

Grandpa Atterbury was ninety-three and doing his first labour since he retired, at eighty-five. The grandchildren, two male and two female, should have been playing childish games. And they were Bolsheviki, all because they had refused to bring in this bunch of stock except for the wage customarily paid to trained adults. Even the youngest, known as Sissy Atterbury, aged eight and looking younger, despite her gray coating of powdered alkali, had tenaciously held out for a grown man's pay, which made her something even worse than a Bolshevik; it made her an I.W.W.

But, as Ma Pettengill said, what could a lady do when Fate had a stranglehold on her. There was, indeed, nothing to do but tell Sissy to tell one of her incendiary brothers to get up close to grandpa, and yell good and loud at him, and make him understand he was to get a count on that bunch at the first gate, because it didn't look to us that there was over three hundred head where there ought to be at least five hundred.