having done them ny good whatever. Sometimes they were returned
to a different place, I imagine, since I know too well how
impartial Casey is with the mechanical parts of a Ford.

He made camp there that night, pitching his little tent in the
trail for pure cussedness, and defying aloud a traveling world to
make him move until he got good and ready. He might have saved
his vocabulary, for the road was impassable before him and
behind; and had Casey managed to start the car, he could not have
driven a mile in either direction.

Since he did not know that, the next day he painstakingly cleaned
the spark plugs and tried again to crank the Ford; couldn't, and
removed more hootin'-annies and dingbats than he had touched the
day before. That night he once more pitched his tent in the
trail, hoping in his heart that some one would drive along and
dispute his right to camp there; when he would lick the doggone
cuss.

On the fourth day, after a long, fatiguing session with the
vitals of a Ford that refused to be cranked, Casey was busy
gathering brush, for his supper fire when Fate came walking up'
the trail. Fate appears in many forms. In this instance it
assumed the shape of a packed burro that poked its nose around a
group of Joshuas, stopped abruptly and backed precipitately into
another burro which swung out of the trail and went careening
awkwardly down the slope. The stampeding burro had not seen the
Ford at all, but accepted the testimony of its leader that
something was radically wrong with the trail ahead. His pack
bumped against the yuccas as he went; after him lurched a large