Casey told me that he aged ten years in the next two weeks, and lost eighty-nine dollars and a half in damages and wages, not counting the two water bags he had to replace out of his stock, at nearly four dollars wholesale price.  When he chased the goats out of his back door they went around and came in at the front, determined, he supposed, to bed down near the truck.

It was late before that occurred to him, and when it did he cranked up and drove the truck a hundred yards down the road that led to the spring.  The goats did not follow as he expected, but stood around the trailer and blatted.  Casey went back and hooked on the trailer and drove again down the road.  The goats would not follow, and he went back to find that Billy had managed to push open the back door and had led his flock into Casey’s kitchen.  There was no kitchen left but the little camp stove, and that was bent so that it stood skew-gee, Casey said, and developed a habit of toppling over just when his coffee came to a boil.

Casey told me that he had to barricade himself in his garage that night, and he swore that Billy stood on his hind feet and stared at him all night through the window in spite of wrenches and pliers hailing out upon him.  However that may be, Billy couldn’t have stood there all night, unless Casey got his dates mixed.  For at six o’clock the Oasis man came over, stepping high and swinging his fists, and told Casey that them damn goats had et all the bedding out of one tent and the soap, towel and one pillow out of another, and what was Casey going to do about it?

Casey did not know,—­and he was famous for his resourcefulness too.  I think he paid for the bedding before the thing was settled.

Casey says that after that it was just one thing after another.  He told me that he never would have believed twelve goats could cover so much cussedness in a day.  He said he couldn’t fill a radiator but some goat would be chewing the baggage tied behind the car, or Billy would be rooting suitcases off the running board.  One party fell in love with a baby goat and Casey in a moment of desperation told them they could have it.  But he was sorry afterward, because the mother stood and blatted at him reproachfully for four days and nights without stopping.

Casey swears that he picked up and threw two tons of rocks every day, and he has no idea how many tons the six families of Patmos heaved at and after the goats.  When they weren’t going headfirst into barrels of water they were chewing something not meant to be chewed.  Casey asserts that it is all a bluff about goats eating tin cans.  They don’t.  He says they never touched a can all the while he had them.  He says devastated Patmos wished they would, and leave the two-dollar lace curtains alone, and clotheslines and water barrels and baggage.  He says many a party drove off with chewed bedding rolls and didn’t know it, and that he didn’t tell them, either.