All this time we had been working steadily away from the ranch.  Long zigzags and side trips carried us little forward, and a constant leftward tendency swung us always around, until we had completed a half circle of which the ranch itself was the centre.  The irrigated fields had given place to open country of a semi-desert character grown high with patches of greasewood, sagebrush, thorn-bush; with wide patches of scattered bunch grass; and stretches of alkali waste.  Here, unexpectedly to me, we stumbled on a strange but necessary industry incidental to so large an estate.  Our nostrils were assailed by a mighty stink.  We came around the corner of some high brush directly on a small two-story affair with a factory smokestack.  It was fenced in, and the fence was covered with drying hides.  I will spare you details, but the function of the place was to make glue, soap, and the like of those cattle whose term of life was marked by misfortune rather than by the butcher’s knife.  The sole workman at this economical and useful occupation did not seem to mind it.  The Captain claimed he was as good as a buzzard at locating the newly demised.

Our ponies did not like the place either.  They snorted violently, and pricked their ears back and forth, and were especially relieved and eager to obey when we turned their heads away.

We rode on out into the desert, our ponies skipping expertly through the low brush and gingerly over the alkali crust of the open spaces beneath which might be holes.  Jackrabbits by the thousand, literally, hopped away in front of us, spreading in all directions as along the sticks of a fan.  They were not particularly afraid, so they loped easily in high-bounding leaps, their ears erect.  Many of them sat bolt upright, looking at least two feet high.  Occasionally we managed really to scare one, and then it was a grand sight to see him open the throttle and scud away, his ears flat back, in the classical and correct attitude of the constantly recurring phrase of the ancients:  “belly to earth he flew!”

Jackrabbits are a great nuisance.  The Captain had to enclose his precious alfalfa fields with rabbit-proof wire to prevent utter destruction.  There was a good deal of fence, naturally, and occasionally the inquiring rabbit would find a hole and crawl through.  Then he was in alfalfa, which is, as every Californian knows, much better than being in clover.  He ate at first greedily, then more daintily, wandering always farther afield in search of dessert.  Never, however, did he forget the precise location of the opening by which he had entered, as was wise of him.  For now, behold, enter the dogs.  Ordinarily these dogs, who were also wise beasts, passed by the jackrabbit in his abundance with only inhibited longing.  Their experience had taught them that to chase jackrabbits in the open with any motive ulterior to that of healthful exercise and the joy of seeing the blame things run was as vain and as puppish as chasing one’s