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.