hly seasoned with plenty of soda in the pancakes and dough-goods?" "Yes, Mr. Macpherson," whined Rufus. "I never complained about your cookin', I've nothin' against you personal, and I'll knock off somethin' on the bill for bringin' in water if you'll jest let down that----" A screech finished the sentence. Then: "C-r-rr-ripes! She's busted through! She's comin' like a river!" He jumped and clawed at the sides in his frenzy, and Wallie could see that Rufus well might do so, for even as Wallie looked the water rushed in and rose to Rufus's ankles, and before he could get the bucket over the edge and started downward it was well to his knees, bubbling faster with every second as the opening widened. It was indeed time for action, and Wallie himself felt relief when the windlass spun and he heard the splash of the bucket in the bottom. Rufus's shrieks urged haste as he began to wind laboriously, and with reason, for Rufus was heavy and though Wallie put forth all his strength it was no easy task single-handed, and Rufus rose so slowly that the water gained rapidly. It became a race between Wallie and the subterranean stream that had been tapped, and he was panting and all but exhausted when Rufus rose to the surface. As he stepped from the bucket the water reached the top, poured over the edge, and rushed down the "draw" to Skull Creek. Wallie looked with bulging eyes for a moment and when he had recovered from his astonishment, he turned joyfully, his grudge forgotten, and shook Rufus's hand in congratulation. A moment later his enthusiasm was tempered somewhat by the discovery that he had brought to the surface the strongest flow of salt water in the country! CHAPTER XIII WIPED OUT "It's shore wicked the way you curse, Old Timer," said Pinkey, reprovingly, as Wallie came up from the corral carrying an empty milk bucket in one hand and testing the other for broken bones. "I could hear you talkin' to Rastus from whur I'm settin'." Wallie exhibited a row of bruised knuckles and replied fiercely: "If ever I had an immortal soul I've lost it since that calf came! Between his bunting on one side and me milking on the other, the cow kicked the pail over." "Quirl you a brownie and blow it threw your hackamore and forgit it," said Pinkey, soothingly, as he handed him a book of cigarette papers, with a sack of tobacco and made room for him on the door-sill. "I ain't used to cow milk anyhow; air-tight is better." Wallie took the offering but remained standing, rolling it dextrously as he looked off at his eighty acres of spring wheat showing emerald green in the light of a July sunset. Pinkey eyed him critically--the tufts of hair which stood out like brushes through the cracks in what had once been a fine Panama hat, his ragged shirt, the faded overalls, the riding boots with heels so run over that he walked on the side of them. Unconscious of the scrutiny, Wallie continued to gaze in a kind of holy ecstasy at his wheat-field until Pinkey ejaculated: "My, but you've changed horrible!" "How, changed?" Wallie asked, absently. "You're so danged dirty! I should think you'd have to sand that shirt before you could hold it to git into it." "I hardly ever take it off," said Wallie. "I've been so busy I haven't had time to think how I looked, but I hope now to have more leisure. Pinkey," impressively, "I believe my troubles are about over." "Don't you think it!" replied Pinkey, bluntly. "A dry-farmer kin have six months of hard luck three times a year for four and five years, hand-runnin'. In fact, they ain't no limit to the time and the kind of things that kin happen to a dry-farmer." "But what _could_ happen now?" Wallie asked, startled. "It's too clost to bed-time fer me to start in tellin' you," said Pinkey, drily. "You're too pessimistic, Pinkey. I've prepared the soil and seed according to the instructions in the Farmers' Bulletins from Washington, and as a result I've got the finest stand of wheat around here--even Boise Bill said so when he rode by yesterday." "Rave on!" Pinkey looked at him mockingly. "It's pitiful to hear you. You read them bulletins awhile and you won't know nothin'. I seen a feller plant some corn his Congressman sent him and the ears was so hard the pigs used to stand and squeal in front of 'em. But of course I'm glad you're feelin' so lucky; I'm scairt of the feelin' myself for it makes me take chances and I always git a jolt for it." Wallie's face was sober as he confided: "If anything went wrong I'd be done for. I'm so near broke that I count my nickels like some old woman with her butter-and-egg money." "I guessed it," said Pinkey, calmly, "from the rabbit fur I see layin' around the dooryard." "Nearly everything has cost double what I thought it would, but if I get a good crop and the price of wheat holds up I'll come out a-flying." "If nothin' happens," Pinkey supplemented. "I want to show you one of those bulletins." "I've seen plenty of 'em. You can't stop 'em once you git 'em started. Them, and pamphlets tellin' us why we went to war, has killed off many a mail-carrier that had to fight his way through blizzards, or be fined fer not deliverin' 'em on schedule. I ain't strong fer gover'mint literature." Wallie stepped inside the cabin and brought out a pamphlet with an illustration of twelve horses hitched to a combined harvester and thresher, standing in a wheat-field of boundless acreage. "There," he said, proudly, "you see my ambition!" Pinkey regarded it, unexcited. "That's a real nice picture," he said, finally, "but I thought you aimed to go in for cattle?" "I did. But I've soured on them since that calf came and I've been milking." Pinkey agreed heartily: "I'd ruther 'swamp' fer a livin' than do low-down work like milkin'." "When I come in at night, dog-tired and discouraged, I get out this picture and look at it and tell myself that some day I'll be driving twelve horses on a thresher. A chap thinks and does curious things when he has nobody but himself for company." "That's me, too," said Pinkey, understandingly. "When I'm off alone huntin' stock, I ride fer hours wonderin' if it's so that you kin make booze out of a raisin." "Let's walk out and look at the wheat," Wallie suggested. Pinkey complied obligingly, though farming was an industry in which he took no interest. Wallie's pride in his wheat was inordinate. He never could get over a feeling of astonishment that the bright green grain had come from seeds of his planting--that it was his--and he would reap the benefit. Nature was more wonderful than he had realized and he never before had appreciated her. He always forgot the heart-breaking and back-breaking labour when he stood as now, surveying with glowing face the even green carpet stretching out before him. In such moments he found his compensation for all he had gone through since he arrived in Wyoming, and he smiled pityingly as he thought of the people at The Colonial, rocking placidly on the veranda. "Did you ever see anything prettier?" Wallie demanded, his eyes shining. "It's all right," Pinkey murmured, absently. "You're not looking," Wallie said, sharply. "I was watchin' them cattle." "I don't see any." Pinkey pointed, but Wallie could see nothing. "If they got cows on Mars, I'll bet I could read the bran's," Pinkey boasted. "Can't you see them specks movin' off yonder?" Wallie admitted he could not. "It's cattle, and they act like somebody's drivin' 'em," Pinkey declared, positively. "Looks like it's too early to be movin' 'em to the mountain." His curiosity satisfied, he gave the wheat his attention. "It looks fine, Wallie," he said with sincerity. Wallie could not resist crowing: "You didn't think I'd last, did you? Miss Spenceley didn't, either. She'll be disappointed very likely when she hears I've succeeded." "Don't cackle till you've laid your aig, Gentle Annie. When you've thrashed and sold your grain and got your money in the bank, then I'll help you. We'll git drunk if I have to rob a drug-store." "You're always putting a damper on me. It was you who advised me to go in for dry-farming," Wallie reminded him. "I figgered that if you lived through a year of it," Pinkey replied, candidly, "then almost anything else would look like a snap to you." It was plain that in spite of his prospects Pinkey was not sanguine, but in this moment of his exultation failure seemed impossible to Wallie. In various small ways Canby had tried to break him and had not succeeded. Boise Bill had prophesied that he would not "winter"--yet here he was with every reason to believe that he would also "summer." Wallie felt rather invincible as he reflected upon it, and the aurora borealis did not exceed in colour the outlook his fancy painted that evening. "It's eight-thirty," Pinkey hinted. "When I set up till all hours I over-sleep in the morning." Wallie came to earth reluctantly, and as he returned to the cabin he again permitted himself the luxury of pitying the folk of The Colonial who knew nothing of such rapturous moments in that stale, uneventful world which was so remote and different from the present that it was beginning to seem like a dream to him. They had been asleep for an hour, more possibly, when Pinkey nudged Wallie violently. "What's that huffin', do you reckon?" Wallie awoke with a start and listened. "Huffing" was the right word. Lying next to the logs, some large animal was breathing so heavily in Wallie's ear that it sounded like a bellows. He peered through a crack and saw something that looked like a mastodon in the darkness tugging at a sack he had used for chinking. It was not a horse and was too large for his Jersey. It flashed through his mind that it might be a roaming silvertip from the mountain. Pinkey was out of the bunk at a bound and around the corner of the cabin, where his suspicions were instantly verified. "It's a bull!" he shouted. "I thought it. Looks like a thousand head of cattle tramplin' down your wheat-field!" Wallie turned sick. He could not move for a moment. His air-castles fell so hard he could almost hear them. "Do you think they've been in long?" he asked, weakly. "Can't tell till daylight." Pinkey was getting into his clothes hurriedly. Wallie was now in the doorway and he could make out innumerable dark shapes browsing contentedly in his grain-field. "What'll we do?" he asked, despairingly. "Do?" replied Pinkey, savagely, tugging at his boot straps. "I'll send one whur the dogs won't bite him with every ca'tridge. We'll run a thousand dollars' worth of taller off the rest of 'em. Git into your clothes, Gentle Annie, and we'll smoke 'em up proper." "I don't see how it could happen," said Wallie, his voice trembling. "The fence was good!" "If it had been twenty feet high 'twould 'a' been all the same," Pinkey answered. "Them cattle was _drove_ in." "You mean----" Wallie's mouth opened. "Shore--Canby! It come to my mind last night when I seen that bunch movin'. Pretty coarse work I call it, but he thought you was alone and wouldn't ketch on to it." "He'll pay for this!" cried Wallie, chokingly. "You can't do nothin' with him but deal him misery. He's got too much money and pull fer you. Do you know what I think's gnawin' on him?" "My taking up a homestead----" "That, too, but mostly because Helene dressed him down for sellin' that locoed team to you. He's jealous." Even in his despair Wallie felt pleased that any one, especially Canby, should be jealous of him because of Helene Spenceley. "He aims to marry her," Pinkey added. "I wisht you could beat his time and win yerself a home somehow. I don't think you got any show, but if I was you I'd take another turn around my saddle-horn and hang on. Whenever I kin," kindly, "I'll speak a good word for you. Throw your saddle on your horse and step, young feller. I'm gone!" The faint hope which Wallie had nursed that the damage might not be so great as he had feared vanished with daylight. Not only was the grain trampled so the field looked like a race course, but panel after panel of the fence was down where the quaking-asp posts had snapped like lead-pencils. As Pinkey and Wallie surveyed it in the early dawn Wallie's voice had a catch in it when he said finally: "I guess I'm done farming. They made a good job of it." "I'm no 'sharp' but it looks to me like some of that wheat would straighten up if it got a good wettin'." Wallie said grimly: "The only thing I forgot to buy when I was outfitting in Philadelphia was a rain-making apparatus." "On the level," Pinkey declared, earnestly, "I bleeve we're goin' to have a shower--the clouds bankin' up over there in the northwest is what made me think of it." Wallie's short laugh was cynical. "It might drown somebody half a mile from me but it wouldn't settle the dust in my dooryard." "I see you're gittin' homesteaditis," Pinkey commented, "but jest the same them clouds look like they meant business." Wallie felt a glimmer of hope in spite of himself and he scrutinized the clouds closely. "They do look black," he admitted. "But since it hasn't rained for two months it seems too much to expect that it will rain when I need it so desperately." "It's liable to do anything. I've seen it snow here in August. A fur-lined linen duster is the only coat fer this country. I'll gamble it's goin' to do _somethin'_, but only the Big Boss knows what." During breakfast they got up at intervals to look through the doorway, and while they washed dishes and tidied the cabin they watched the northwest anxiously. "She's movin' right along," Pinkey reported. "It might be a stiddy rain, and then agin it might be a thunder-shower, though you don't often look for 'em in the morning." The light grew subdued with the approaching storm and Wallie commented upon the coolness. Then he went out in the dooryard and stood a moment. "The clouds are black as ink, and how still it is," he said, wonderingly. "There isn't a breath of air stirring." Pinkey was sitting on the floor oiling his saddle when he tilted his head suddenly, and listened. He got up abruptly and stood in the doorway, concentrating all his faculties upon some sound of which he alone was cognizant, for Wallie was aware of nothing unusual save the uncanny stillness. "Hear that?" The sharp note in Pinkey's voice filled Wallie with a nameless fear. "No--what?" "That roar--can't you hear it?" Wallie listened intently. "Yes--like a crashing--what is it?" "Hail! And a terror! We've got to run the stock in." He was off with Wallie following and together they got the cow and horses under shelter with all the haste possible. The sound preceded the storm by some little time, but each moment the roar and the crash of it grew louder and when it finally reached them Wallie gazed open-mouthed. Accustomed to hail like tapioca, he never had seen anything like the big, jagged chunks of ice which struck the ground with such force that they bounded into the air again. Any one of them would have knocked a man unconscious. It seemed as if they would batter his roof in, and they came so thick that the stable and corral could be seen only indistinctly. They both stood in the doorway, fascinated and awe-stricken. "Hear it pound! This is the worst I've seen anywhur. You're licked, Gentle Annie." "Yes," said Wallie with a white face. "This finishes me." "You'll have to kiss your wheat good-bye. It'll be beat into the ground too hard ever to straighten." He laid an arm about Wallie's shoulder and there was a sympathy in his voice few had heard there: "You've put up a good fight, old pardner, and even if you are counted out, it's no shame to you. You've done good fer a Scissor-bill, Gentle Annie." Wallie clenched his hands and shook himself free of Pinkey's arm while his tense voice rang out above the clatter and crash of the storm: "I'm not licked! I _won't_ be licked! _I'm going to stick, somehow!_ And what's more," he turned to Pinkey fiercely, "if you don't stop calling me 'Gentle Annie,' I'll knock your block off!" Pinkey looked at him with his pale, humorous eyes and beamed approvingly. CHAPTER XIV LIFTING A CACHE The Prouty barber lathering the face of a customer, after the manner of a man whitewashing a chicken coop, paused on an upward stroke to listen. Then he stepped to the door, looked down the street, and nodded in confirmation. After which he returned, laid down his brush, and pinned on a nickel badge, which act transformed him into the town constable. The patron in the chair, a travelling salesman, watched the pantomime with interest. "One moment, please." The barber-officer excused himself and stepped out to the edge of the sidewalk, where he awaited the approach of a pair on horseback who were making the welkin ring with a time-honoured ballad of the country: I'm a howler from the prairies of the West. If you want to die with terror, look at me. I'm chain-lightnin'---- As they came abreast the constable held out his hand and the pair automatically laid six-shooters in it and went on without stopping in their song: --if I ain't, may I be blessed. I'm a snorter of the boundless, lone prairee. Other citizens than the barber recognized the voices, and frowned or smiled as happened, among whom was Mr. Tucker repairing a sofa in the rear of his "Second-Hand Store." Returning, the constable laid the six-shooters on the shelf among the shaving mugs and removed his badge. "Who's that?" inquired the patron, since the barber offered no explanation. "Oh, them toughs--'Gentle Annie' Macpherson and 'Pinkey' Fripp," was the answer in a wearied tone. "I hate to see 'em come to town." The pair continued to warble on their way to the livery barn on a side street: I'm the double-jawed hyena from the East. I'm the blazing, bloody blizzard of the States. I'm the celebrated slugger---- The song stopped as Pinkey asked: "Shall we work together or separate?" To this mysterious question Wallie replied: "Let's try it together first." After attending personally to the matter of feeding their horses oats, the two set forth with the air of having a definite purpose. Their subsequent actions confirmed it, for they approached divers persons of their acquaintance as if they had business of a confidential nature. The invariable result of these mysterious negotiations, however, was a negative shake of the head. After another obvious failure Pinkey said gloomily: "If I put in half the time and thought trying to be a Senator that I do figgerin' how to git a bottle, I'd be elected." Wallie replied hopefully: "Something may turn up yet." "I'd lift a cache from a preacher! I'd steal booze off my blind aunt! I'd----" "We'll try some more 'prospects' before we give up. It's many months since I've gone out of town sober and I don't like to establish a precedent. I'm superstitious about things like that," said Wallie. At this unquestionably psychological moment Mr. Tucker beckoned them from his doorway. They responded with such alacrity that their gait approached a trot, although they had no particular reason to believe that it was his intention to offer them a drink. It was merely a hope born of their thirst. Their reputation was such, however, that any one who wished to demonstrate his friendship invariably evidenced it in this way, taking care, in violation of the ethics of bygone days, to do the pouring himself. Mr. Tucker winked elaborately when he invited them in, and Wallie and Pinkey exchanged eloquent looks as they followed him to his Land Office in the rear of the store. Inside, he locked the door and lowered the shade of the single window which looked out on an areaway. No explanation was necessary as he took a hatchet and pried up a plank. This accomplished, he reached under the floor and produced a tin cup and a two-gallon jug. He filled it with a fluid of an unfamiliar shade and passed it to Pinkey, who smelled it and declared that he could drink anything that was wet. Wallie watched him eagerly as it gurgled down his throat. "Well?" Mr. Tucker waited expectantly for the verdict. Pinkey wiped his mouth. "Another like that and I could watch my mother go down for the third time and laugh!" "Where did you get it?" Wallie in turn emptied the cup and passed it back. "S-ss-sh!" Mr. Tucker looked warningly at the door. "I made it myself--brown sugar and raisins. You like it then?" "If I had about 'four fingers' in a wash-tub every half hour---- What would you hold a quart of that at?" Pinkey leaned over the opening in the floor and sniffed. Mr. Tucker hastily replaced the plank and declared: "Oh, I wouldn't dast! I jest keep a little on hand for my particular friends that I can trust. By the way, Mr. Macpherson, what are you goin' to do with that homestead you took up?" "Hold it. Why?" "I thought I might run across a buyer sometime and I wondered what you asked." A hardness came into Wallie's face and Tucker added: "I wasn't goin' to charge you any commission--you've had bad luck and----" "You're the seventh philanthropist that's wanted to sell that place in my behalf for about $400, because he was sorry for me," Wallie interrupted, drily. "You tell Canby that when he makes me a decent offer I'll consider it." "No offence--no offence, I hope?" Tucker protested. "Oh, no." Wallie shrugged his shoulder. "Only don't keep getting me mixed with the chap that took up that homestead. I've had my eyeteeth cut." Extending an invitation to call and quench their thirsts with his raisinade when next they came to town, Tucker unlocked the door. After the two had wormed their way through the bureaus and stoves and were once more in the street, they turned and gave each other a long, inquiring look. "Pink," demanded Wallie, solemnly, "did you smell anything when he raised that plank?" "Did I smell anything! Didn't you see me sniff? That joker has got a cache of the real stuff and he gave us raisinade! I couldn't git an answer from a barrel of that. He couldn't have insulted us worse if he'd slapped our faces." "A man ought to be punished that would do a wicked thing like that." "You've said somethin', Gentle Annie." The two looked at each other in an understanding that was beautiful and complete. The behaviour of the visitors was nearly too good to be true--it was so exemplary, in fact, as to be suspicious, and acting upon this theory, the barber closed his shop early, pinned on his badge of office, and followed them about. But when at ten o'clock they had broken nothing, quarrelled with nobody, and drunk only an incredible quantity of soda pop, he commenced to think he had been wrong. At eleven, when they were still in a pool-hall playing "solo" for a cent a chip, he decided to go home. There he confided to his wife that no more striking example of the benefits of prohibition had come under his observation than the conduct of this notorious pair who, when sober, were well mannered and docile as lambs. It was twelve or thereabouts when two figures crept stealthily up the alley behind Mr. Tucker's Second-Hand Store and raised the window looking out on the areaway. As noiselessly as trained burglars they pried up the plank and investigated by the light of a match. "Well, what do you think of that!" "I feel like somebody had died and left me a million dollars!" said Pinkey in an awed tone, reaching for a tin cup. "I didn't think they was anybody in the world as mean as Tucker." "You mustn't get too much," Wallie admonished, noting the size of the drink Pinkey was pouring for himself. "I've never had too much. I may have had enough, but never too much," Pinkey grinned. "I don't take no int'rest in startin' less'n a quart." "I hope he'll have the decency to be ashamed of himself when he finds out we know what he did to us. I shouldn't think he'd want to look us in the face," Wallie declared, virtuously. "He won't git a chanst to look in my face for some time to come if we kin lift this cache." Together they filled the grain sack they had brought and carefully replaced the plank, then, staggering under the weight of the load, made their way to a gulch, buried the sack, and marked the hiding-place with a stone. With a righteous sense of having acted as instruments of Providence in punishing selfishness, they returned to town to follow such whims as seized them under the stimulus of a bottle of Mr. Tucker's excellent Bourbon. The constable had been asleep for hours when a yell--a series of yells--made him sit up. He listened a moment, then with a sigh of resignation got up, dressed, and took the key of the calaboose from its nail by the kitchen sink. "I'll lock 'em up and be right back," he said to his sleepy wife, who seemed to know whom he meant too well to ask. Under the arc light in front of the Prouty House he found them doing the Indian "stomp" dance to the delight of the guests who were leaning from their windows to applaud. "Ain't you two ashamed of yerselves?" the constable demanded, scandalized--referring to the fact that Pinkey and Wallie had divested themselves of their trousers and boots and were dancing in their stocking feet. "Ashamed?" Wallie asked, impudently. "Where have I heard that word?" "Who sold liquor to you two?" "I ate a raisin and it fermented," Wallie replied, pertly. "Where's your clothes?" To Pinkey. "How'sh I know?" "You two ought to be ordered to keep out of town. You're pests. Come along!" "Jus' waitin' fer you t'put us t'bed," said Pinkey, cheerfully. The two lurched beside the constable to the calaboose, where they dropped down on the hard pads and temporarily passed out. The sun was shining in Wallie's face when he awoke and realized where he was. He and Pinkey had been there too many times before not to know. As he lay reading the pencilled messages and criticisms of the accommodation left on the walls by other occupants he subconsciously marvelled at himself that he should have no particular feeling of shame at finding himself in a cell. He was aware that it was accepted as a fact that he had gone to the bad. He had been penurious as a miser until he had saved enough from his wages as a common cowhand to buy his homestead outright from the State. After that he had never saved a cent, on the contrary, he was usually overdrawn. He gambled, and lost no opportunity to get drunk, since he calculated that he got more entertainment for his money out of that than anything else, even at the "bootlegging" price of $20 per quart which prevailed. So he had drifted, learning in the meantime under Pinkey's tutelage to ride and shoot and handle a rope with the best of them. Pinkey had left the Spenceley ranch and they were both employed now by the same cattleman. He rarely saw Helene, in consequence, but upon the few occasions they had met in Prouty she had made him realize that she knew his reputation and disapproved of it. In the East she had mocked him for his inoffensiveness, now she criticized him for the opposite. It was plain, he thought disconsolately, that he could not please her, yet it seemed to make no difference in his own feelings for her. His face reddened as he recalled the boasts he had made upon several occasions and how far he had fallen short of fulfilling them. He was going to "show" them, and now all he had to offer in evidence was 160 acres gone to weeds and grasshoppers, his saddle, and the clothes he stood in. It was not often that Wallie stopped to take stock, for it was an uncomfortable process, but his failure seemed to thrust itself upon him this morning. He was glad when Pinkey's heavy breathing ceased in the cell adjoining and he began to grumble. "Looks like a town the