He was a tall, limber-jointed, whipped-looking man with a red nose and a long stringy mustache, and always wore his vest open clear down to the lower button which was fastened, and thus his whole waistcoat was thrown open so as to show a tobacco-stained shirt bosom.  The Missourian whom I had noticed at table said that this was done so that the wearer of the vest could reach his dirk handily.  But Mobley was the last man I should have suspected of carrying a dirk, or if he did packing the gumption to use it.

I made good with my gang, and did a third more than any other eight teams on the place.  Before I went away, Gowdy talked around as if he wanted me for overseer; but I couldn’t decide without studying a long time, to take a step so far from what I had been thinking of, and he dropped the subject.  I did not like the way things were going there.  The men were out of control.  They despised Mobley, and said sly things about his using his wife to keep him in a job.  One day I told Magnus Thorkelson about Mrs. Mobley’s coming and taking Gowdy away from the little cabin of the Fewkes family.

“She do dat,” said he, “a dozen times ven Ay bane dar.  She alvays bane chasing Buck Gowdy.”

“Well,” I said, “who be you chasing, coming over here a dozen times when I didn’t know it?  That’s why you bought that mustang pony, eh?”

“I yust go over,” said he, squirming, “to help Surajah fix up his machines—­his inwentions.  Sometimes I take over de wyolin to play for Rowena.  Dat bane all, Yake.”

When we went home, I with money enough for some new clothes, with what I had by me, we caught a ride with one of Judge Stone’s teams to a point two-thirds of the way to Monterey Centre, and came into our own places from the south.  We were both glad to see long black streaks of new breaking in the section of which my eighty was a part, and two new shanties belonging to new neighbors.  This would bring cultivated land up to my south line, and I afterward found out, take the whole half of the section into the new farms.  The Zenas Smith family had moved on to the southwest quarter, and the J.P.  Roebuck family on the southeast.

The Smiths and Roebucks still live in the township—­as good neighbors as a man need ask for; except that I never could agree with Zenas Smith about line fences, when the time came for them.  Once we almost came to the spite-fence stage; but our children were such friends that they kept us from that disgrace.  But Mrs. Smith was as good a woman in sickness as I ever saw.

George Story was working for the Smiths, and was almost one of the family.  He finally took the northeast quarter of the section, and lives there yet.  David Roebuck, J.P.’s son, when he came of age acquired the eighty next to me, and thus completed the settlement of the section.  Most of the Roebuck girls and boys became school-teachers, and they had the biggest mail of anybody in the neighborhood.  I never saw Dave Roebuck spelled down but once, and that was by his sister Theodosia, called “Dose” for short.