When he left Rosemary he went straight down to where the chuck-wagon stood,
and began to tap the tires with a small rock to see if they would need
resetting before he started out. He decided that the brake-blocks would have
to be replaced with new ones--or at least reshod with old boot-soles. The
tongue was cracked, too; that had been done last winter when Luck was
producing The Phantom Herd and had sent old Dave Wiswell down a rocky hillside
with half-broken bronks harnessed to the wagon, in a particularly dramatic
scene. Applehead went grumblingly in search of some baling wire to wrap the
tongue. He had been terribly excited and full of enthusiasm for the picture at
the time the tongue was cracked, but now he looked upon it merely as a vital
weakness in his roundup outfit. A new tongue would mean delay; and delay, in
his present mood, was tragedy.

He couldn't find any old baling wire, though he had long been accustomed to
tangling his feet in snarled bunches of it when he went forth in the dark
after a high wind. Until now he had not observed its unwonted absence from the
yard. For a long while he had not needed any wire to mend things, because Luck
had attended to everything about the ranch, and if anything needed mending he
had set one of the Happy Family at the task.

His search led him out beyond the corrals in the little dry wash that
sometimes caught and held what the high winds brought rolling that way. The
wash was half filled with tumble-weed, so that Applehead was forced to get
down into it and kick the weeds aside to see if there was any wire lodged
beneath. His temper did not sweeten over the task, especially since he found
nothing that he wanted.

Annie-Many-Ponies, riding surreptitiously up the dry wash--meaning to come out
in a farther gully and so approach the corral from the west instead of from
the east--came upon Applehead quite unexpectedly. She stopped and eyed him