appeared; a figure that shivered in the moonlight. The dog bristled
and whined. "S-s-s-h!" whispered Sundown. "It's me, ain't it?"

With his bundle of clothes beneath his arm, he picked a hesitating
course across the yard and deposited the bundle beside the
water-trough. Chance, not altogether satisfied with Sundown's
assurance, proclaimed his distrust by a long nerve-reaching howl. Some
one in the bunkhouse muttered. Sundown squatted hastily in the shadow
of the trough. Bud Shoop rose from his bunk and crept to the door. He
saw nothing unusual, and was about to return to his bed when an
apparition rose slowly from behind the water-trough. The foreman drew
back in the shadow of the doorway and watched.

Sundown's bath was extensive as to territory but brief as to duration.
He dried himself with a gunny-sack and slipped shivering into his new
raiment. "That there September Morn ain't got nothin' on me except
looks," he spluttered. "And she is welcome to the looks. Shirts and
pants for mine!"

Then he crept back to his blankets and slept the sleep of one who has
atoned for his sins of omission and suffered righteously in the ordeal.

Bud Shoop wanted to laugh, but forgot to do it. Instead he padded back
to his bunk and lay awake pondering. "Takin' a bath sure does make a
fella feel like the fella he wants to feel like--but in the
drinkin'-trough, at night . . .! I reckon that there Hobo ain't right
in his head."

Sundown dreamed that he was chasing an elusive rabbit over endless
wastes of sand and greasewood. With him ran a phantom dog, a lean,