I’ve got a hired man. He dropped like manna, out of the skies, or, rather, he emerged like a tadpole out of the mud. But there’s something odd about him and I’ve a floaty idea he’s a refugee from justice and that some day one of the Mounties will come riding up to my shack-door and lead my farm-help away in handcuffs.

Whatever he is, I can’t quite make him out. But I have my suspicions, and I’m leaving everything in abeyance until they’re confirmed.

I was on Paddy the other morning, in my old shooting-jacket and Stetson, going like the wind for the Dixon Ranch, after hearing they had a Barnado boy they wanted to unload on anybody who’d undertake to keep him under control. The trail was heavy from the night rain that had swept the prairie like a new broom, but the sun was shining again and the air was like champagne. The ozone and the exercise and Paddy’s legato stride all tended to key up my spirits, and I went along humming:

It wasn’t until I saw Paddy’s ear prick up like a rabbit’s that I noticed the gun-boat on the trail ahead. At least I thought it was a gun-boat, for a minute or two, until I cantered closer and saw that it was a huge gray touring-car half foundered in the prairie-mud. Beside it sat a long lean man in very muddy clothes and a rather disreputable-looking hat. He sat with a ridiculously contented look on his face, smoking a small briar pipe, and he laughed outright as I circled his mud-hole and came to a stop opposite the car with its nose poked deep down in the mire, for all the world like a rooting shote.

“Good morning, Diana,” he said, quite coolly, as he removed his battered-looking cap.

His salutation struck me as impertinent, so I returned it in the curtest of nods.

“Are you in trouble?” I asked.

“None whatever,” he airily replied, still eying me. “But my car seems to be, doesn’t it?”

“What’s wrong?” I demanded, determined that he shouldn’t elbow me out of my matter-of-factness.

He turned to his automobile and inspected it with an indifferent eye.

“I turned this old tub into a steam-engine, racing her until the water boiled, and she got even with me by blowing up an intake hose. But I’m perfectly satisfied.”

“With what?” I coldly inquired.

“With being stuck here,” he replied; He had rather a bright gray eye with greenish lights in it, and he looked rational enough. But there was something fundamentally wrong with him.

“What makes you feel that way?” I asked, though for a moment I’d been prompted to inquire if they hadn’t let him out a little too soon.

“Because I wouldn’t have seen you, who should be wearing a crescent moon on your brow, if my good friend Hyacinthe hadn’t mired herself in this mud-hole,” he had the effrontery to tell me.

“Is there anything so remarkably consolatory in that vision?” I asked, deciding that I might as well convince him he wasn’t confronting an untutored she-coolie of the prairie. Whereupon he studied me more pointedly and more impersonally than ever.

“It’s more than consolatory,” he said with an accentuating flourish of the little briar pipe. “It’s quite compensatory.”

It was rather ponderously clever, I suppose; but I was tired of both verbal quibbling and roadside gallantry.

“Do you want to get out of that hole?” I demanded. For it’s a law of the prairie-land, of course, never to side-step a stranger in distress.

“Not if it means an ending to this interview,” he told me.

It was my turn to eye him. But there wasn’t much warmth in the inspection.

“What are you trying to do?” I calmly inquired, for prairie life hadn’t exactly left me a shy and timorous gazelle in the haunts of that stalker known as Man.

“I’m trying to figure out,” he just as calmly retorted, apparently quite unimpressed by my uppity tone, “how anything as radiant and lovely as you ever got landed up here in this heaven of chilblains and coyotes.”

The hare-brained idiot was actually trying to make love to me. And I then and there decided to put a brake on his wheel of eloquence.

“And I’m still trying to figure out,” I told him, “how what impresses me as rather a third-class type of man is able to ride around in what looks like a first-class car! Unless,” and the thought came to me out of a clear sky, and when they come that way they’re inspirations and are usually true, “unless you stole it!”

He turned a solemn eye on the dejected-looking vehicle and studied it from end to end.

“If I’m that far behind Hyacinthe,” he indifferently acknowledged, “I begin to fathom the secret of my life failure. So my morning hasn’t been altogether wasted.”

“But you did steal the car?” I persisted.

“That must be a secret between us,” he said, with a distinctly guilty look about the sky-line, as though to make sure there were no sheriffs and bloodhounds on his track.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded, determined to thrash the thing out, now that it had been thrust upon me.

“Talking to the most charming woman I’ve encountered west of the Great Lakes,” he said with an ironic and yet a singularly engaging smile. But I didn’t intend him to draw a herring across the trail.

“I’d be obliged if you’d be sincere,” I told him, sitting up a little straighter on Paddy.

“I am sincere,” he protested, putting away his pipe.

“But the things you’re saying are the things the right sort of person refrains from expressing, even when he happens to be the victim of their operation.”

“Yes, that’s quite true, in drawing-rooms,” he airily amended. “But this is God’s open and untrammeled prairie.”

“Where crudeness is king,” I added.

“Where candor is worth more than convention,” he corrected, with rather a wistful look in his eye. “And where we mortals ought to be at least as urbane as that really wonderful robin-egg sky up there with the chinook arch across it.”

He wasn’t flippant any more, and I had a sense of triumph in forcing his return to sobriety. I wanted to ask him what his name was, once we were back to earth again. But as that seemed a little too direct, I merely inquired where his home happened to be.

“I’ve just come from up North!” he said. And that, I promptly realized, was an evasive way of answering an honest question, especially as there was a California license-number on the front of his car.

“And what’s your business?” I inquired, deciding to try him out with still one more honest question.

“I’m a windmill man,” he told me, as he waded in toward his dejected-looking automobile and lifted up its hood. I took him literally, for there wasn’t anything, at the time, to make me think of Cervantes. But I’d already noticed his hands, and I felt sure they weren’t the hands of a laboring man. They were long and lean and finicky-fingered hands, the sort that could span an octave much better than they could hold a hayfork. And I decided to see him hoisted by his own petard.

“Then you’re just the man I’m looking for,” I told him. He stopped for a moment to look up from the bit of heavy rubber-hose he was winding with a stretch of rubber that looked as though it had been cut from an inner tube.

“Words such as those are honey to my ears,” he said as he went on with his work. And I saw it was necessary to yank him down to earth again.

“I’ve a broken-down windmill over on my ranch,” I told him. “And if you’re what you say you are, you ought to be able to put it in running order for me.”

“Then you’ve a ranch?” he observed, stopping in his work.

“A ranch and a husband and three children,” I told him with the well-paraded air of a tabby-cat who’s dragged her last mouse into the drawing-room. But my announcement didn’t produce the effect I’d counted on. All I could see on the face of the windmill man was a sort of mild perplexity.

“That only deepens the mystery,” he observed, apparently as much to himself as to me.

“What mystery?” I asked.

“You!” he retorted.

“What’s wrong with me?” I demanded.

“You’re so absurdly alive and audacious and sensitive and youthful-hearted, dear madam! For the life of me I can’t quite fit you into the narrow little frame you mention.”

“Is it so narrow?” I inquired, wondering why I wasn’t much more indignant at him. But instead of answering that question, he asked me another.

“Why hasn’t this husband of yours fixed the windmill?” he casually asked over his shoulder, as he resumed his tinkering on the car-engine.

“My husband’s work keeps him away from home,” I explained, promptly on the defensive.

“I thought so,” he announced, with the expression of a man who’s had a pet hypothesis unexpectedly confirmed.

“Then what made you think so?” I demanded, with a feeling that he was in some way being subtler than I could quite comprehend.

“Instinct—if you care to call it that,” he said as he stooped low over his engine. He seemed offensively busy there for a considerable length of time. I could see that he was not what in the old days I’d have called a window-dresser. And I rather liked that pretense of candor in his make-up, just as I cottoned to that melodious drawl of his, not altogether unlike Lady Alicia’s, with its untoward suggestion of power and privilege. He was a man with a mind of his own; there was no denying that. I was even compelled to remind myself that with all his coolness and suavity he was still a car-thief, or perhaps something worse. And I had no intention of sitting there and watching him pitch shut-out ball.

“What are you going to do about it?” I asked, after he’d finished his job of bailing ditch-water into his car-radiator with a little collapsible canvas bucket.

He climbed into his driving-seat, mud to the knees, before he answered me.

“I’m going to get Hyacinthe out of this hole,” was what he said. “And then I’m going to fix that windmill!”

“On what terms?” I inquired.

“What’s the matter with a month’s board and keep?” he suggested.

It rather took my breath away, but I tried not to betray the fact. He was a refugee, after all, and only too anxious to go into hiding for a few weeks.

“Can you milk?” I demanded, deciding to keep him in his place, from the start. And he sadly acknowledged that he wasn’t able to milk. Windmill men seldom were, he casually asserted.

“Then you’ll have to make yourself handy, in other ways,” I proclaimed as he sat appraising me from his deep-padded car-seat.

“All right,” he said, as though the whole thing were settled, on the spot. But it wasn’t so simple as it seemed.

“How about this car?” I demanded. His eye met mine; and I made note of the fact that he was compelled to look away.

“I suppose we’ll have to hide it somewhere,” he finally acknowledged.

“And how’ll you hide a car of that size on the open prairie?” I inquired.

“Couldn’t we bury it?” he asked with child-like simplicity.

“It’s pretty well that way now, isn’t it? But I saw it three miles off,” I reminded him.

“Couldn’t we pile a load of prairie-hay over it?” he suggested next, with the natural cunning of the criminal. “Then they’d never suspect.”

“Suspect what?” I asked.

“Suspect where we got it,” he explained.

“Kindly do not include me in any of your activities of this nature,” I said with all the dignity that Paddy would permit of, for he was getting restless by this time.

“But you’ve included yourself in the secret,” he tried to argue, with a show of injured feelings. “And surely, after you’ve wormed that out of me, you’re not going to deliver a poor devil over to—”

“You can have perfect confidence in me,” I interrupted, trying to be stately but only succeeding, I’m afraid, in being stiff. And he nodded and laughed in a companionable and laisser-faire sort of way as he started his engine and took command of the wheel.

Then began a battle which I had to watch from a distance because Paddy evinced no love for that purring and whining thing of steel as it rumbled and roared and thrashed and churned up the mud at its flying heels. It made the muskeg look like a gargantuan cake-batter, in which it seemed to float as dignified and imperturbable as a schooner in a canal-lock. But the man at the wheel kept his temper, and reversed, and writhed forward, and reversed again. He even waved at me, in a grim sort of gaiety, as he rested his engine and then went back to the struggle. He kept engaging and releasing his clutch until he was able to impart a slight rocking movement to the car. And again the big motor roared and churned up the mud and again Paddy took to prancing and pirouetting like a two-year-old. But this time the spinning rear wheels appeared to get a trace of traction, flimsy as it was, for the throbbing gray mass moved forward a little, subsided again, and once more nosed a few inches ahead. Then the engine whined in a still higher key, and slowly but surely that mud-covered mass emerged from the swale that had sought to engulf and possess it, emerged slowly and awkwardly, like a dinosauros emerging from its primeval ooze.

The man in the car stepped down from his driving-seat, once he was sure of firm ground under his wheels again, and walked slowly and wistfully about his resurrected devil-wagon.

“The wages of sin is mud,” he said as I trotted up to him. “And how much better it would have been, O Singing Pine-Tree, if I’d never taken that car!”

The poor chap was undoubtedly a little wrong in the head, but likable withal, and not ill-favored in appearance, and a man that one should try to make allowances for.

“It would have been much better,” I agreed, wondering how long it would be before the Mounted Police would be tracking him down and turning him to making brooms in the prison-factory at Welrina.

“Now, if you’ll kindly trot ahead,” he announced as he relighted his little briar pipe, “and show me the trail to the ranch of the blighted windmill, I’ll idle along behind you.”

I resented the placidity with which he was accepting a situation that should have called for considerable meekness on his part. And I sat there for a silent moment or two on Paddy, to make that resentment quite obvious to him.

“What’s your name?” I asked, the same as I’d ask the name of any new help that arrived at Alabama Ranch.

“Peter Ketley,” he said, for once both direct and sober-eyed.

“All right, Peter,” I said, as condescendingly as I was able. “Just follow along, and I’ll show you where the bunk-house is.”

It was his grin, I suppose, that irritated me. So I started off on Paddy and went like the wind. I don’t know whether he called it idling or not, but once or twice when I glanced back at him that touring-car was bounding like a reindeer over some of the rougher places in the trail, and I rather fancy it got some of the mud shaken off its running-gear before it pulled up behind the upper stable at Alabama Ranch.

“You ride like a ritt-meister,” he said, with an approvingly good-natured wag of the head, as he came up as close as Paddy would permit.

“Danke-schÖn!” I rather listlessly retorted, “And if you leave the car here, close beside this hay-stack, it’ll probably not be seen until after dinner. Then some time this afternoon, if the coast is clear, you can get it covered up.”

I was a little sorry, the next moment, that I’d harped still again on an act which must have become painful for him to remember, since I could see his face work and his eye betray a tendency to evade mine. But he thanked me, and explained that he was entirely in my hands.

Such being the case, I was more excited than I’d have been willing to admit when I led him into the shack. Frontier life had long since taught me not to depend too much on appearances, but the right sort of people, the people who out here are called “good leather,” would remain the right sort of people in even the roughest wickiup. We may have been merely ranchers, but I didn’t want Peter, whatever his morals, to think that we ate our food raw off the bone and made fire by rubbing sticks together.

Yet he must have come pretty close to believing that, unimpeachable as his manners remained, for Whinnie had burned the roast of veal to a charry mass, the Twins were crying like mad, and Dinkie had painted himself and most of the dining-room table with Worcestershire sauce. I showed Peter where he could wash up and where he could find a whisk to remove the dried mud from his person. Then I hurriedly appeased my complaining bairns, opened a can of beans to take the place of Whinnie’s boiled potatoes, which most unmistakably tasted of yellow soap, and supplemented what looked dishearteningly like a Dixon dinner with my last carefully treasured jar of raspberry preserve.

Whinstane Sandy, it is true, remained as glum and silent as a glacier through all that meal. But my new man, Peter, talked easily and uninterruptedly. And he talked amazingly well. He talked about mountain goats, and the Morgan rose-jars in the Metropolitan, and why he disliked George Moore, and the difference between English and American slang, and why English women always wear the wrong sort of hats, and the poetry in Indian names if we only had the brains to understand ’em, and how the wheat I’d manufactured my home-made bread out of was made up of cellulose and germ and endosperm, and how the alcohol and carbonic acid gas of the fermented yeast affected the gluten, and how the woman who could make bread like that ought to have a specially designed decoration pinned on her apron-front. Then he played “Paddy-cake, paddy-cake, Baker’s man,” with Dinkie, who took to him at once, and when I came back from getting the extra cot ready in the bunk-house, my infant prodigy was on the new hired man’s back, circling the dinner-table and shouting “Gid-dap, ’ossie, gid-dap!” as he went, a proceeding which left the seamed old face of Whinstane Sandy about as blithe as a coffin-lid. So I coldly informed the newcomer that I’d show him where he could put his things, if he had any, before we went out to look over the windmill. And Peter rather astonished me by lugging back from the motor-car so discreetly left in the rear a huge suit-case of pliable pigskin that looked like a steamer-trunk with carrying-handles attached to it, a laprobe lined with beaver, a llama-wool sweater made like a Norfolk-jacket, a chamois-lined ulster, a couple of plaid woolen rugs, and a lunch-kit in a neatly embossed leather case.

“Quite a bit of loot, isn’t it?” he said, a little red in the face from the effort of portaging so pretentious a load.

That word “loot” stuck in my craw. It was a painful reminder of something that I’d been trying very hard to forget.

“Did it come with the car?” I demanded.

“Yes, it came with the car,” he was compelled to acknowledge. “But it would be exhausting, don’t you see, to have to tunnel through a hay-stack every time I wanted a hair-brush!”

I icily agreed that it would, scenting tacit reproof in that mildly-put observation of his. But I didn’t propose to be trifled with. I calmly led Mr. Peter Ketley out to where the overturned windmill tower lay like a museum skeleton along its bed of weeds and asked him just what tools he’d need. It was a simple question, predicating a simple answer. Yet he didn’t seem able to reply to it. He scratched his close-clipped pate and said he’d have to look things over and study it out. Windmills were tricky things, one kind demanding this sort of treatment and another kind demanding that.

“You’ll have no trouble, of course, in raising the tower?” I asked, looking him square in the eye. More than once I’d seen these windmill towers of galvanized steel girders put up on the prairie, and I had a very good idea of how the thing was done. They were assembled lying on the ground, and then a heavy plank was bolted to the bottom side of the tower base. This plank was held in place by two big stakes. Then a block and tackle was attached to the upper part of the tower, with the running-rope looped over a tripod of poles, to act as a fulcrum, so that when a team of horses was attached to the tackle the tower pivoted on its base and slowly rose in the air, steadied by a couple of guy-ropes held out at right angles to it.

“Oh, no trouble at all,” replied the expert quite airily. But I noticed that his eye held an especially abstracted and preoccupied expression.

“Just how is it done?” I innocently inquired.

“Well, that all depends,” he sapiently observed. Then, apparently nettled by my obviously superior smile, he straightened up and said: “I want you to leave this entirely to me. It’s my problem, and you’ve no right to be worried over it. It’ll take study, of course, and it’ll take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. But before I leave you, madam, your tower will be up.”

“I hope you’re not giving yourself a life sentence,” I remarked as I turned and left him.

I knew that he was looking after me as I went, but I gave no outer sign of that inner knowledge. I was equally conscious of his movements, through the shack window, when he possessed himself of a hay-fork and with more than one backward look over his shoulder circled out to where his car still stood. He tooled it still closer up beside the hay-stack, which he mounted, and then calmly and cold-bloodedly buried under a huge mound of sun-cured prairie-grass that relic of a past crime which he seemed only too willing to obliterate.

But he was callous, I could see, for once that telltale car was out of sight, he appeared much more interested in the water-blisters on his hands than the stain on his character. I could even see him inspect his fingers, from time to time, as he tried to round off the top of his very badly made stack, and test the joints by opening and closing them, as though not quite sure they were still in working order. And when the stack-making was finished and he returned to the windmill, circling about the fallen tower and examining its mechanism and stepping off its dimensions, I noticed that he kept feeling the small of his back and glancing toward the stack in what seemed an attitude of resentment.

When Whinnie came in with one of the teams, after his day a-field, I noticed that Peter approached him blithely and attempted to draw him into secret consultation. But Whinnie, as far as I could see, had no palate for converse with suspicious-looking strangers. He walked several times, in fact, about that mysterious new hay-stack, and moved shackward more dour and silent than ever. So that evening the worthy Peter was a bit silent and self-contained, retiring early, though I strongly suspected, and still suspect, that he’d locked himself in the bunk-house to remove unobserved all the labels from his underwear.

In the morning his appearance was not that of a man at peace with his own soul. He even asked me if he might have a horse and rig to go in to the nearest town for some new parts which he’d need for the windmill. And he further inquired if I’d mind him bringing back a tent to sleep in.

“Did you find the bunk-house uncomfortable?” I asked, noticing again the heavy look about his eyes.

“It’s not the bunk-house,” he admitted. “It’s that old Caledonian saw-mill with the rock-ribbed face.”

“What’s the matter with Whinnie?” I demanded, with a quick touch of resentment. And Peter looked up in astonishment.

“Do you mean you’ve never heard him—and your shack not sixty paces away?”

“Heard him what?” I asked.

“Heard him snore,” explained Peter, with a sigh.

“Are you sure?” I inquired, remembering the mornings when I’d had occasion to waken Whinnie, always to find him sleeping as silent and placid as one of my own babies.

“I had eight hours of it in which to dissipate any doubts,” he pointedly explained.

This mystified me, but to object to the tent, of course, would have been picayune. I had just the faintest of suspicions, however, that the fair Peter might never return from Buckhorn, though I tried to solace myself with the thought that the motor-car and the beaver-lined lap-robe would at least remain with me. But my fears were groundless. Before supper-time Peter was back in high spirits, with the needed new parts for the windmill, and an outfit of blue denim apparel for himself, and a little red sweater for Dinkie, and an armful of magazines for myself.

Whinnie, as he stood watching Peter’s return, clearly betrayed the disappointment which that return involved. He said nothing, but when he saw my eye upon him he gazed dourly toward his approaching rival and tapped a weather-beaten brow with one stubby finger. He meant, of course, that Peter was a little locoed.

But Peter is not. He is remarkably clear-headed and quick-thoughted, and if there’s any madness about him it’s a madness with a deep-laid method. The one thing that annoys me is that he keeps me so continuously and yet so obliquely under observation. He pretends to be studying out my windmill, but he is really trying to study out its owner. Whinnie, I know, won’t help him much. And I refuse to rise to his gaudiest flies. So he’s still puzzling over what he regards as an anomaly, a farmerette who knows the difference between De Bussey and a side-delivery horse-rake, a mother of three children who can ride a pinto and play a banjo, a clodhopper in petticoats who can talk about Ragusa and Toarmina and the summer races at Piping Rock. But it’s a relief to converse about something besides summer-fallowing and breaking and seed-wheat and tractor-oil and cows’ teats. And it’s a stroke of luck to capture a farm-hand who can freshen you up on foreign opera at the same time that he campaigns against the domestic weed!