III
THE REAL PERUVIAN DOUGHNUTS
The affairs of Arrowhead Ranch are administered by its owner, Mrs.
Lysander John Pettengill, through a score or so of hired experts. As a
trout-fishing guest of the castle I found the retainers of this
excellent feudalism interesting enough and generally explicable. But
standing out among them, both as a spectacle and by reason of his
peculiar activities, is a shrunken little man whom I would hear
addressed as Jimmie Time. He alone piqued as well as interested. There
was a tang to all the surmises he prompted in me.
I have said he is a man; but wait! The years have had him, have scoured
and rasped and withered him; yet his face is curiously but the face of a
boy, his eyes but the fresh, inquiring, hurt eyes of a boy who has been
misused for years threescore. Time has basely done all but age him. So
much for the wastrel as Nature has left him. But Art has furthered the
piquant values of him as a spectacle.
In dress, speech, and demeanour Jimmie seems to be of the West,
Western--of the old, bad West of informal vendetta, when a man's
increase of years might lie squarely on his quickness in the "draw";
when he went abundantly armed by day and slept lightly at
night--trigger fingers instinctively crooked.
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