LITMIR.BIZ

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stopped. Casey was inside sitting on the ground and letting the most recently filled water bag drip down the back of his neck. He shouted to Juan, but Juan had gone somewhere to find himself a cool spot for his siesta, so Casey got slowly to his feet and went out to meet Trouble, sopping his wet hair against the back of his head with the flat of his hand before he put on his hat. He squinted into the sunshine and straightway squared himself for business.

      This was a two-ton truck fitted for camping. A tall, lean man whose overalls hung wide from his suspenders and did not seem to touch his person anywhere, climbed out and stood looking at the bare rims of two wheels, as if he had at that moment discovered them.

      “Thinkin’ about the price uh tires, stranger?” Casey grinned cheerfully. “It’s lucky I got your size, at that. Fabrics and cords—and the difference in price is more’n made up in wear. Run yer car inside outa the sun whilst I change yer grief into joy.”

      “I teen havin’ hard luck all along,” the man complained listlessly. “Geewhillikens, but it shore does cost to travel!”

      Casey should have been warned by that. Bill would have smelled a purse lean as the man himself and would have shied a little. But Casey could meet Trouble every morning after breakfast and yet fail to recognize her until she had him by the collar.

      “You ask anybody if it don’t!” he agreed sympathetically, mentally going over his rack of tires, not quite sure that he had four in that size, but hoping that he had five and that he could persuade the man to invest. He surely needed rubber, thought Casey, as he scrutinized the two casings on the car. He stood aside while the man backed, turned a wide half-circle and drove into the grateful shade of the garage. It seemed cool in there after the blistering sunlight, unless one glanced at Casey’s thermometer which declared a hundred and nineteen with its inexorable red line.

      “Whatcha got there? Goats?” Casey’s eyes had left the wheels of the trucks and dwelt upon a trailer penned round and filled with uneasy animals.

      “Yeah. Twelve, not countin’ the little fellers. And m’wife an’ six young ones all told. Makes quite a drag on the ole boat. Knocks thunder outa tires, too. You say you got my size? We-ell, I guess I got to have ‘em, cost er no cost.”

      “Sure you got to have ‘em. It’s worse ahead than what you been over, an’ if I was you I’d shoe ‘er all round before I hit that lava stretch up ahead here. You could keep them two fer extras in case of accident. Might git some wear outa them when yuh strike good roads again, but they shore won’t go far in these rocks. You ask anybody.”

      “We-ell—I guess mebby I better—I don’t see how I’m goin’ to git along any other way, but—”

      Casey had gone to find where Juan had cached himself and to pluck that apathetic youth from slumber and set him to work. Four casings and tubes for a two-ton truck run into money, as Casey was telling himself complacently. He had not yet sold any tires for a two-ton truck, and he had just two fabrics and two cords, in trade vernacular. He paid no further attention to the man, since there would be no bickering. When a man has only two badly chewed tires, and four wheels, argument is superfluous.

      So Casey mildly kicked Juan awake and after the garage jack, and himself wheeled out his four great pneumatic tires, and with his jackknife slit the wound paper covering, and wondered what it was that smelled so unpleasant. A goat bleated plaintively to remind him of their presence. Another goat carried on the theme, and the chorus swelled quaveringly and held to certain minor notes. Within the closed truck a small child whimpered and then began to cry definitely at the top of its voice.

      Casey looked up from bending over the fourth tire wrapping. “Better let your folks git out and rest awhile,” he invited hospitably. “It’s goin’ to take a little time to put these tires on. I got some cold water back there—help yourself.”

      “Well, I’d kinda like to water them goats,” the man observed diffidently. “They ain’t had a drop sence early yest-day mornin’. You got water here, ain’t yuh? An’ they might graze around a mite whilst we’re here. Travelin’ like this, I try to kinda give ‘em a chanct when we stop along the road. It’s been an awful trip. We come clear from Wyoming. How far is it from here to San Jose, Californy?”

      Casey had in the first week learned that it is not wise for a garage man to confess that he does not know distances. People always asked him how far it was to some place of which he had never heard, and he had learned to name figures at random very convincingly. He named now what seemed to him a sufficient number, and the man said “Gosh!” and went back to let down the end gate of the trailer and release the goats. “You said you got water for ‘em?” he asked, his tone putting the question in the form of both statement and request.

      When you are selling four thirty-six-sixes, two of them cords, to a man, you can’t be stingy with a barrel of water, even if it does cost fifty cents. Casey told Juan to go borrow a tub next door and show the man where the water barrel stood. Juan, squatted on his heels while he languidly pumped the jack handle up and down, and seeming pleased than otherwise when the jack slipped and tilted so that he must lower it and begin all over again, got languidly to his bare feet and lounged off obediently. According to Juan’s simple philosophy, to obey was better than to dodge hammers, pliers or monkey wrenches, since Casey’s aim was direct and there was usually considerable force of hard, prospector’s muscle behind it.

      Juan was gone a long while, long enough to walk slowly to the station of Patmos and back again, but he returned with the tub, and the incessant bleating of the goats stilled intermittently while they drank. By this time Casey had forgotten the goats, even with the noise of them filling his ears.

      Casey was down on his knees hammering dents out of the rim of a front wheel so that the new tire could go on. Four of the six offspring crowded around him, getting in the way of Casey’s hammer and asking questions which no man could answer and remain normal. Casey had, while he unwrapped the casings, made a mental reduction in the price. Even Bill would throw off a little, he told himself, on a sale like this. Mentally he had deducted twenty-five dollars from the grand total, but before he had that rim straightened he said to himself that he’d be darned if he discounted more than twenty.

      “Humbolt an’ Greeley, you git away from there an’ git out here an’ git these goats a-grazin’,” the lean customer called sharply from the rear of the garage. Humbolt and Greeley hastily proceeded to git, which left two unkempt young girls standing there at Casey’s elbow so that he could not expectorate where he pleased, or swear at all. Wherefore Casey was appreciably handicapped in his work, and he wished that he were away out in the hills digging into the side of a gulch somewhere, sun-blistered, broke, more than half starving on short rations and with rheumatism in his right shoulder and a bunion giving him a limp in the left foot. He could still be happy—

      “What yuh doin’ that for?” the shrillest voice repeated three times rapidly, with a sniffle now and then by way of punctuation.

      “To make little girls ask questions,” grunted Casey, glancing around him for the snub-nosed, double-headed, four-pound hammer which he called affectionately by the name Maud. The biggest girl had Maud. She had turned it upright on its handle and was sitting on the head of it. When Casey reached for it and got it, without apology or warning, the girl sprawled backward and howled.

      “Porshea, you git up from there! Shame on yuh!” A shrill woman voice, very much like the younger voices except that it was worn rough and querulous with age and many hardships, called down from the truck. Casey looked up, startled, and tried to remember just what he had said before the girls appeared to silence him. The woman was very large both in height and in bulk, and she was heaving herself out of the truck in a way that reminded Casey oddly of a disgruntled hippopotamus he had once watched coming out of its tank at a circus. Casey moved modestly away and did not look, after that first glance. A truck, you will please understand, is not a touring car, and ladies who have passed the two-hundred-pound notch on the scales should remain up there and call for a step-ladder.

      She descended, and the jack slipped and let the car down with a six-inch lurch. Casey is remarkably quick in his motions. He turned,

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