her, his voice unexpectedly changing to a shrill falsetto on the last
word, as frequently happens to rob a mancub of his dignity just when he
needs it most.

"That ridge before your face, chump," Helen May informed him crossly. "If
it comes to choosing between goats and a boy, I'll take the goats! And if
there's any spot on the face of the earth worse than this, I'd like to
know where it is. The idea of expecting people to live in such a country!
It looks for all the world like magnified pictures of the moon's surface.
And," she added with a dreary kind of vindictiveness, "it's here, and I'm
here. I can't get away from it--that's the dickens of it." Then, because
Helen May had a certain impish sense of humor, she sat down and laughed
at the incongruity of it all. "Me--me, here in the desert trying to
raise goats! Can you beat that?"

She watched Vic toiling up the ridge, using the hoe-handle with a slavish
dependence upon its support that tickled Helen May again. "You'd think,"
she told the scenery for want of other companionship, "you'd think Vic
was seventy-nine years old at the very least. Makes a difference whether
he's after a bunch of tame goats or hiking with a bunch of boy scouts to
the top of Mount Wilson! I don't believe that kid ever did wear his legs
out having fun, and it's a sure thing he'll never wear them out working!
Say goats to him and he actually gets round-shouldered and limps."

Vic disappeared over the ridge beyond the spring. Lower down, where the
ridge merged into the Basin itself, the big curly-horned Billy that had
cost Helen May more than any half dozen of his followers stepped out
briskly at the head of the band. Helen May wondered what new depravity
was in his mind, and whether Vic would cross the gully he was in and
confront Billy in time to change the one idea that seemed always to