Casey simply did not know anything about goats.  He ought to have used a little logic and not so much happy-go-lucky “t’ell with the goats.”  That is all very well, so far as it goes, and we all know that everybody says it and thinks it.  But it does, not settle the problem.  It never occurred to Casey, for instance, that the going of Humbolt and Greeley and the little spotted dog would make any difference.  It really did make a great deal, you see.  And it never occurred to Casey that goats are domesticated animals after they have been hauled around the country for weeks and weeks in a trailer to a truck, or that they will come back to the only home they know.

I don’t know how long it takes goats to fill up.  I never kept a goat or goats.  And I don’t know how long they will stand around and blat before they start something.  I don’t know much more about goats than Casey, or didn’t, at least, until he told me.  By that time Casey knew a lot more, I suspect, than he could put into words.

Casey says that he heard them blatting around outside, but he was busy trying to straighten a radius rod—­Casey said he was taking the kinks outa that hootin’-annie that goes behind the front ex and turns the dingbats when you steer—­for a man who walked back and forth and slapped his hands together nervously and kept asking how long it was going to take, and how far it was to Barstow, and whether the road from there up across the Mojave was in good condition, and whether the Death Valley road out from Ludlow went clear through the valley and was a cut-off north, or whether it just went into the valley and stopped.  Casey says that the only time he ever was in Death Valley it was with a couple of burros and that he like to have stayed there.  He got to telling the man about his trip into Death Valley and how he just did get out by a scratch.

So he didn’t pay any attention to the goats until he went back after some cold water for the white little woman in the car, that looked all tuckered out and scared.  It was then he found the whole corner chewed off one water bag and the other water bag on the ground and a lot more than the corner gone.  And the billy was up on his hind feet with his horns caught in the fullest barrel, and was snorting and snuffling in a drowning condition and tilting the barrel perilously.  The other goats were acting just like plain damn goats, said Casey, and merely looking for trouble without having found any.

Casey says he had to call the Oasis man to help him get Billy out of the barrel, and that even then he had to borrow a saw and saw off one horn—­ either that, or cave in the barrel with Maud—­and he needed that barrel worse than the billy goat needed two horns; but he told me that if he’d had Maud in his two hands just then he sure would have caved in the goat.

At that, the nervous man got away without paying Casey, which I think rankled worse than a spoiled barrel of water.