Ma Pettengill | Page 2

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 the whale was the noblest beast left to us in all the animal kingdom and would vanish like the buffalo if treated as food. She said it was shameful to reduce this majestic creature of the deep to the dimensions of a chafing dish and a three-cornered slice of toast. Then she knitted.
She had