He admitted he didn’t know too much about the cow business, but said he was willing to learn; so I put him on the payroll.  We found he was willing to try anything that looked easy; for instance, like setting on colts for the first time.  The first morning he went to work it was rainy, with the ground pretty wet, and he was out to the corral watching Sandy Sawtelle break a colt.  That’s the best time to handle colts that has never been set on.  They start to act up and pour someone out of the saddle; then they slip and slide, helpless, and get the idea a regler demon of a rider is up there, and give in.  So the boys give Herman a fussy two-year-old, and Herman got away with it not so bad.

Of course he was set off a few times, but not hard; and the colt, slicking over this wet ground, must of thought another star rider had come to town.  Two days later, though, when the ground was dry, Herman got on the same wild animal again, and it wasn’t there when he come down from his first trip aloft.  It traded ends with him neatly and was off in a corner saying.  “Well, looks like that German ain’t such a dandy rider after all!  I couldn’t pull that old one with him yesterday, but I certainly done it good to-day.”

I wasn’t near enough to hear what Herman said when he picked himself up; but I’m a good lip reader since I been going to these moving pictures, and I’m way mistaken if he hadn’t learned two or three good things in English to call a horse at certain times.

He walked for several days with trench feet, and his morale was low indeed.  He was just that simple.  He’d try things that sane punchers wouldn’t go looking for, if sober; in fact, he was so simple you might call him simple-minded and not get took up for malicious slander.

So it come to where we seen he wasn’t good for anything on this ranch but chore boy.  And naturally we needed a chore boy, like we needed everything else.  He could get up wood, and feed the pigs we was fattening, and milk the three dairy cows, and make butter, and help in the kitchen.  But as for being a cow hand, he wasn’t even the first joint on your little finger.  He was willing, but his Maker had stopped right at that point with him.  And he had a right happy time being chore boy.

Of course the boys kidded him a lot after they found out he could positively not be enraged by the foulest aspersions on the character of the Kaiser and his oldest son.  They seen he was just an innocent dreamer, mooning round the place at his humble tasks.  They spent a lot of good time thinking up things for him.

He’d brought a German shotgun with silver trimmings with him, which he called a fowling piece, and he wanted to hunt in his few leisure moments; so the boys told him all the kinds of game that run wild on the place.

There was the cross-feathered snee, I remember, which was said by the bird books to be really the same as the sidehill mooney.  It has one leg shorter than the other and can be captured by hand if driven to level ground, where it falls over on its side in a foolish manner when it tries to run.  Herman looked forward to having one of these that he could stuff and send to his uncle in Cincinnati, who wrote that he had never seen such a bird.