“Darn such a country!” is what she said, gritting the words between her teeth.

“See anything of ’em?” bellowed Vic from the spring below, where he was engaged in dipping up water with a tomato can and pouring it over his head, shivering ecstatically as the cold trickles ran down his neck.

Helen May glanced down at him with no softening of her eyes.  Vic had lost nine goats out of the flock he had been set to herd, and he failed to manifest any great concern over the loss.  On the contrary, he had told Helen May that he wished he could lose the whole bunch, and that he hoped coyotes had eaten them up, if they didn’t have sense enough to stay with the rest.  There had been a heated argument, and Helen May had not felt sure of coming out of it a victor.

“No, I didn’t, and you’d better get back to work or the rest will be gone, too,” she called down to him petulantly.  “It’s bad enough to lose nine, without letting the rest go.”

“Aw, ’s matter with yuh, anyway?” Vic retorted in a tone he thought would not reach her ears.  “By gosh, you don’t want a feller to cool off, even!  By gosh, you’d make a feller sleep with them darned goats if you could get away with it!  Bu-lieve me, anybody can have my job that wants it.  ’S hot enough to fry eggs in the shade, and she thinks, by hen, that I oughta stay out there—­”

“Yes, I do.  And if you want anything to eat to-night, Vic Stevenson, you get right back there with those goats!  They’re going over the hill this minute.  Hurry, Vic!  For heaven’s sake, are you trying to take a bath in that can?  Climb up that ridge and cut across and head them off!  That old Billy’s headed for town again—­hurry!”

“Aw for gosh sake!” grumbled Vic, stooping reluctantly to pick up the old hoe-handle he used for a staff.  “What ridge?” He paused to thunder up at her, his voice unexpectedly changing to a shrill falsetto on the last word, as frequently happens to rob a mancub of his dignity just when he needs it most.

“That ridge before your face, chump,” Helen May informed him crossly.  “If it comes to choosing between goats and a boy, I’ll take the goats!  And if there’s any spot on the face of the earth worse than this, I’d like to know where it is.  The idea of expecting people to live in such a country!  It looks for all the world like magnified pictures of the moon’s surface.  And,” she added with a dreary kind of vindictiveness, “it’s here, and I’m here.  I can’t get away from it—­that’s the dickens of it.”  Then, because Helen May had a certain impish sense of humor, she sat down and laughed at the incongruity of it all.  “Me—­me, here in the desert trying to raise goats!  Can you beat that?”

She watched Vic toiling up the ridge, using the hoe-handle with a slavish dependence upon its support that tickled Helen May again.  “You’d think,” she told the scenery for want of other companionship, “you’d think Vic was seventy-nine years old at the very least.  Makes a difference whether he’s after a bunch of tame goats or hiking with a bunch of boy scouts to the top of Mount Wilson!  I don’t believe that kid ever did wear his legs out having fun, and it’s a sure thing he’ll never wear them out working!  Say goats to him and he actually gets round-shouldered and limps.”