As a workman Leander was, considering his size and apparent weakness, surprisingly efficient.  It was as a dispenser of anti-theological doctrine that Mrs. Dax’s husband annoyed his temporary employer.  Freed from his wife’s masterful presence, Leander dared to be an “agnostic,” as he called himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order.  His iconoclasm was not of a pattern with paw’s gusty protests against life in general, but it was Leander’s way of asserting himself, on the rare occasions when he got a chance, to deny clamorously every tenet advanced by every religion.  The mere use of certain familiar expletives drove him, ordinarily mild and submissive though he was, to frantic gesticulation and diatribe.  Mary Carmichael could not make out, as she watched the comedy with growing amusement, whether poor Leander really believed that he was the first of doubting Thomases, or whether he took an unfair advantage of the lack of general information in his casual audiences to set forth well-known opinions as his own.  Whatever its basis may have been, Leander sustained the role of doubter with passionate zeal, wearing himself to tatters of rage and hoarseness over arguments maliciously contrived beforehand by cow-punchers and sheep-herders in need of amusement; and yet he never saw the traps, going out of his way, apparently, to fall into them, tumbling headlong into the identical pits time after time.  Jonah and the whale constituted one bait by means of which Leander could be lured from food, sleep, or work of the most pressing nature.

“The poor fool would stop in the middle of shearing a sheep to argue that Jonah never come out of the whale’s belly,” the matriarch had told Mary Carmichael, in summing up Leander’s disadvantages as a herder.  And the first remark she had addressed to him on his arrival was:  “Leander Dax, you’d have to be made over, and made different, to keep you from bein’ a infidel, but there’s one p’int on which you are particularly locoed, and that’s Jonah and the whale.  Now at this particular time in the hist’ry of the United States, nobody in his faculties has got no call to fret hisself over Jonah and his whereabouts—­none whatever.  There’s a lot of business round this here camp that’s a heap more pressin’.  Now, Leander Dax, if I do hereby undertake to hire, engage, and employ you to herd sheep, do you agree to renounce discussions, arguments, and debates on the late Jonah and his whereabouts durin’ them three days?  God A’mighty, man, any one would think you was Jonah’s wife, the interest you have in his absence!”

“I come here to herd sheep,” Leander had brazenly retaliated.  “I ’ain’t come to try to make you think.”