Ma Pettengill | Page 2

and once was enough. Sandy
brought it right there, though going rather too much like a martyr to the
stake, I thought; for surely it was not shameful that he should prove
inept in the new craft.
Nor was there aught but genial kindness in the lady's reception of him.
Ma Pettengill, arrayed in Sabbath bravery of apparel, as of a debutante
at a summer hotel where the rates are exorbitant, instantly laid by her
own knitting and questioned him soothingly. It seemed to be a simple
difficulty. Sandy had reached the point where a sweater must have a
neck, and had forgotten his instructions. Cordially the woman aided
him to subtract fourteen from two hundred and sixty-two and then to
ascertain that one hundred and twenty-four would be precisely half of
the remainder. It was all being done, as I have remarked, with the
gentlest considering kindness, with no hint of that bitterness which the
neophyte had shown himself to be fearing in the lady. Was she not

kindness itself? Was she not, in truth, just a shade too kind? Surely
there was a purr to her voice, odd, unwonted; and surely her pupil
already cringed under a lash that impended.
Yet this visible strain, it seemed, had not to do with knitted garments.
Ma Pettengill praised the knitting of Sandy; praised it to me and praised
it to him. Of course her remark that he seemed to be a born knitter and
ought to devote his whole time to it might have seemed invidious to a
sensitive cowman, yet it was uttered with flawless geniality. But when
Sandy, being set right, would have taken his work and retired, as was
plainly his eager wish, his mentor said she would knit two of the new
short rows herself, just to make sure. And while she knitted these two
rows she talked. She knitted them quickly, though the time must have
seemed to Sandy much longer than it was.
"Here stands the greatest original humorist in Kulanche County," said
the lady, with no longer a purring note in her voice. She boomed the
announcement. Sandy, drooping above her, painfully wore the
affectation of counting each stitch of the flashing needles. "And
practical jokes--my sakes alive! He can think of the funniest jokes to
put up on poor, unsuspecting people! Yes, sir; got a genius for it. And
witty! Of course it ain't just what he says that's so funny--it's the noisy
way he says it.
"And you wouldn't think it to look at him, but he's one of these here
financial magnets, too. Oh, yes, indeed! Send him out with a hatful of
ten-dollar bills any day and he won't let one of 'em go for a cent under
six dollars, not if buyers is plenty--he's just that keen and avaricious.
That's his way. Never trained for it, either; just took it up natural."
With drawn and ashen face Mr. Sawtelle received back his knitting. His
pose was to appear vastly preoccupied and deaf to insult. He was still
counting stitches as he turned away and clattered down the steps.
"Say!" called his employer. Sandy turned.
"Yes, ma'am!"

"You seen the party that stopped here this morning in that big,
pompous touring car?"
"No, ma'am!"
"They was after mules."
"Yes, ma'am!"
"They offered me five hundred dollars a span for mine."
"No, ma'am--I mean, yes, ma'am!"
"That's all. I thought you'd rejoice to know it." The lady turned to me as
if Mr. Sawtelle had left us. "Yes, sir; he'd make you die laughing with
some of his pranks, that madcap would. I tell you, when he begins
cutting up--"
But Mr. Sawtelle was leaving us rapidly. His figure seemed to be
drawn in, as if he would appear smaller to us. Ma Pettengill seized her
own knitting once more, stared grimly at it, then stared grimly down at
the bunk house, within which her victim had vanished. A moment later
she was pouring tobacco from a cloth sack into a brown cigarette paper.
She drew the string of the sack--one end between her teeth--rolled the
cigarette with one swift motion and, as she waited the blaze of her
match, remarked that they had found a substitute for everything but the
mule. The cigarette lighted, she burned at least a third of its length in
one vast inhalation, which presently caused twin jets of smoke to issue
from the rather widely separated corners of a generous mouth. Upon
which she remarked that old Safety First Timmins was a game winner,
about the gamest winner she'd ever lost to.
Three other mighty inhalations and the cigarette was done. Again she
took up the knitting, pausing for but one brief speech before the needles
began their shrewd play. This concerned the whale. She said