Ma Pettengill was more versatile this day. The first gate I struggled
with she called Armstrong in a manner dryly descriptive; for the second
she managed a humorous leer to illumine the term; for the third,
secured with a garland of barbed wire that must be painfully untwisted,
she employed a still broader humour. Even a child would then have known
that calling this criminal device the Armstrong gate was a joke of
uncommon richness.
As I remounted, staunching the inevitable wound from barbed wire, I
began to speak in the bitterly superior tones of an efficiency expert as
we traversed a field where hundreds of white-faced Herefords were
putting on flesh to their own ruin. I said to my hostess that I vastly
enjoyed lifting a hundred-pound gate--and what was the loss of a little
blood between old friends, even when aggravated by probable tetanus
germs? But had she ever paused to compute the money value of time lost
by her henchmen in dismounting to open these clumsy makeshifts? I
suggested that, even appraising the one reliable ranch joke in all the
world at a high figure, she would still profit considerably by putting
in gates that were gates, in place of contrivances that could be handled
ideally only by a retired weight lifter in barbed-wire-proof armour.
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