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.I got some cold water back there—help yourself.""Well, I'd kinda like to water them goats," the man observed diffidently."They ain't had a drop sence early yest-day mornin'.You got water here, ain't yuh? An' they might graze around a mite whilst we're here.Travelin' like this, I try to kinda give 'em a chanct when we stop along the road.It's been an awful trip.We come clear from Wyoming.How far is it from here to San Jose, Californy?"Casey had in the first week learned that it is not wise for a garage man to confess that he does not know distances.People always asked him how far it was to some place of which he had never heard, and he had learned to name figures at random very convincingly.He named now what seemed to him a sufficient number, and the man said "Gosh!" and went back to let down the end gate of the trailer and release the goats."You said you got water for 'em?" he asked, his tone putting the question in the form of both statement and request.When you are selling four thirty-six-sixes, two of them cords, to a man, you can't be stingy with a barrel of water, even if it does cost fifty cents.Casey told Juan to go borrow a tub next door and show the man where the water barrel stood.Juan, squatted on his heels while he languidly pumped the jack handle up and down, and seeming pleased than otherwise when the jack slipped and tilted so that he must lower it and begin all over again, got languidly to his bare feet and lounged off obediently.According to Juan's simple philosophy, to obey was better than to dodge hammers, pliers or monkey wrenches, since Casey's aim was direct and there was usually considerable force of hard, prospector's muscle behind it.Juan was gone a long while, long enough to walk slowly to the station of Patmos and back again, but he returned with the tub, and the incessant bleating of the goats stilled intermittently while they drank.By this time Casey had forgotten the goats, even with the noise of them filling his ears.Casey was down on his knees hammering dents out of the rim of a front wheel so that the new tire could go on.Four of the six offspring crowded around him, getting in the way of Casey's hammer and asking questions which no man could answer and remain normal.Casey had, while he unwrapped the casings, made a mental reduction in the price.Even Bill would throw off a little, he told himself, on a sale like this.Mentally he had deducted twenty-five dollars from the grand total, but before he had that rim straightened he said to himself that he'd be darned if he discounted more than twenty."Humbolt an' Greeley, you git away from there an' git out here an' git these goats a-grazin'," the lean customer called sharply from the rear of the garage.Humbolt and Greeley hastily proceeded to git, which left two unkempt young girls standing there at Casey's elbow so that he could not expectorate where he pleased, or swear at all.Wherefore Casey was appreciably handicapped in his work, and he wished that he were away out in the hills digging into the side of a gulch somewhere, sun-blistered, broke, more than half starving on short rations and with rheumatism in his right shoulder and a bunion giving him a limp in the left foot.He could still be happy—"What yuh doin' that for?" the shrillest voice repeated three times rapidly, with a sniffle now and then by way of punctuation."To make little girls ask questions," grunted Casey, glancing around him for the snub-nosed, double-headed, four-pound hammer which he called affectionately by the name Maud.The biggest girl had Maud.She had turned it upright on its handle and was sitting on the head of it.When Casey reached for it and got it, without apology or warning, the girl sprawled backward and howled."Porshea, you git up from there! Shame on yuh!" A shrill woman voice, very much like the younger voices except that it was worn rough and querulous with age and many hardships, called down from the truck.Casey looked up, startled, and tried to remember just what he had said before the girls appeared to silence him.The woman was very large both in height and in bulk, and she was heaving herself out of the truck in a way that reminded Casey oddly of a disgruntled hippopotamus he had once watched coming out of its tank at a circus.Casey moved modestly away and did not look, after that first glance.A truck, you will please understand, is not a touring car, and ladies who have passed the two-hundred-pound notch on the scales should remain up there and call for a step-ladder.She descended, and the jack slipped and let the car down with a six-inch lurch.Casey is remarkably quick in his motions.He turned, jumped three feet and caught the lady's full weight in his arms as she was falling toward him.Probably he would have caught it anyway, but then there would have been little left of Casey, and his troubles would have been finished instead of being just begun.He had just straightened the jack and was beginning to lift the bare wheel off the ground again when the fifth offspring descended.Casey thought again of the hippopotamus in its infancy.The fifth was perhaps fifteen, but she had apparently reached her full growth, which was very nearly that of her mother
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