“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, jumped three feet and caught the lady’s full weight in his arms as she was falling toward him.  Probably he would have caught it anyway, but then there would have been little left of Casey, and his troubles would have been finished instead of being just begun.

He had just straightened the jack and was beginning to lift the bare wheel off the ground again when the fifth offspring descended.  Casey thought again of the hippopotamus in its infancy.  The fifth was perhaps fifteen, but she had apparently reached her full growth, which was very nearly that of her mother.  She had also reached the age of self-consciousness, and she simpered at Casey when he assisted her to alight.

Casey was not bashful, nor was he over-fastidious; men who have lived long in the wilderness are not, as a rule.  Still, he had his little whims, and he failed to react to the young lady’s smile.  His pale blue eyes were keen to observe details and even Casey did not approve of “high-water marks” on feminine beauty.

Well, that brought the whole family to view save the youngest who had evidently dropped asleep and was left in the truck.  Casey went to work on the wheel again, after directing mother and daughter to the desert water bag which swung suspended from ropes in the rear of the garage.

Ten minutes later a dusty limousine stopped for gas and oil, and Casey left his work to wait upon them.  There was a very good-looking girl driving, and the man beside her was undoubtedly only her father, and Casey was humanly anxious to be remembered pleasantly when they drove on.  He asked them to wait and have a drink of cold water, and was deeply humiliated to find that both water bags were empty,—­the overgrown girl having used the last to wash her face.  Casey didn’t like her any the better for that, or for having accentuated the high-water mark, or for forcing him to apologize to the pretty driver of the limousine.