chaps hanging upon
wooden pegs. And in the next stall he saw the horse Hapgood had
ridden.

"Hasn't Hapgood gone yet?" he asked of Pete.

"I don't reckon he has. He had supper with the Ol' Man up to the house
las' night. An' I guess he's stayed over to res' up."

They swung to their horses' backs and rode through the trees and on
eastward across a long grassy slope from which the shadows of the
night were just beginning to lift. As day came on Conniston saw that
ahead of them for miles ran a barren-looking, treeless country, rising
on the one hand to the foot of the mountains, falling away gradually
on the other to the Big Flat. They rode swiftly, side by side, for
five miles, passing through many grazing herds of cattle, many smaller
bands of horses. And finally, when they came to a wire fence running
north and south, Lonesome Pete swung down from his saddle.

On the ground near the fence were hammers, a pick, a shovel, and a
crowbar. The old barley-sack at the foot of one of the posts gave out
the jingle of nails as Pete's boot struck against it. And Conniston,
dismounting and tying his horse, began his first lesson in
fence-repairing.

The loose wires they tightened with the short iron bar, in the end of
which a V-shaped cut had been made. While Pete caught the slack wire
with this bar, and, using the post as a fulcrum, the bar as a lever,
drew it taut, Conniston with hammer and staples made it secure. Now
and again they found a rotten post which must be taken out, while a
new one from a row which had been dumped from a wagon yesterday was
put into its place.

It was easy work, and Conniston found, that he rather enjoyed the
novelty of it. But as hour after hour dragged by with the same
unceasing monotony, as the sun crept burning into the hot sky, and the
wires, the crowbar, even the pick-handle blistered his hands, he began
to feel the cramp of fatigue in his stooping shoulders and in his
forearms and back. Noon came at last, and he and Lonesome Pete ate the
cold lunch which the latter had brought, drank from the bottle of
water, and lay down for a smoke. Conniston had left his pipe at the
bunk-house, and accepted from his fellow-worker his coarse, cheap
tobacco and brown papers.

The morning had been endlessly long. The afternoon was an eternity. It
was hotter now that the sun had rolled past the zenith, now that the
sand had drunk deep of its fiery rays. The air shimmered and danced
above the gray mono