b a drug-store."

"You're always putting a damper on me. It was you who advised me to go
in for dry-farming," Wallie reminded him.

"I figgered that if you lived through a year of it," Pinkey replied,
candidly, "then almost anything else would look like a snap to you."

It was plain that in spite of his prospects Pinkey was not sanguine, but
in this moment of his exultation failure seemed impossible to Wallie.

In various small ways Canby had tried to break him and had not
succeeded. Boise Bill had prophesied that he would not "winter"--yet
here he was with every reason to believe that he would also "summer."
Wallie felt rather invincible as he reflected upon it, and the aurora
borealis did not exceed in colour the outlook his fancy painted that
evening.

"It's eight-thirty," Pinkey hinted. "When I set up till all hours I
over-sleep in the morning."

Wallie came to earth reluctantly, and as he returned to the cabin he
again permitted himself the luxury of pitying the folk of The Colonial
who knew nothing of such rapturous moments in that stale, uneventful
world which was so remote and different from the present that it was
beginning to seem like a dream to him.

They had been asleep for an hour, more possibly, when Pinkey nudged
Wallie violently.

"What's that huffin', do you reckon?"

Wallie awoke with a start and listened.

"Huffing" was the right word. Lying next to the logs, some large animal
was breathing so heavily in Wallie's ear that it sounded like a bellows.
He peered through a crack and saw something that looked like a mastodon
in the darkness tugging at a sack he had used for chinking. It was not a
horse and was too large for his Jersey. It flashed through his mind that
it might be a roaming silvertip from the mountain.

Pinkey was out of the bunk at a bound and around the corner of the
cabin, where his suspicions were instantly verified.

"It's a bull!" he shouted. "I thought it. Looks like a thousand head of
cattle tramplin' down your wheat-field!"

Wallie turned sick. He could not move for a moment. His air-castles fell
so hard he could almost hear them.

"Do you think they've been in long?" he asked, weakly.

"Can't tell till daylight." Pinkey was getting into his clothes
hurriedly.

Wallie was now in the doorway and he could make out innumerable dark
shapes browsing contentedly in his grain-field.

"What'll we do?" he asked, despairingly.

"Do?" replied Pinkey, savagely, tugging a