verywhere
the Captain rode he could see that his man had been busy.

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