s!' Some dudes on the other side of the
street took their hats off to her and began to laugh. I couldn't stand
it any longer. I grabbed the whip and lit into that team, and they tore
up the hill like jack-rabbits, them damned melons bouncing out the back
every jump, the old man cussin' an' yellin' behind and everybody
laughin'. I never looked behind, but the whole of Capitol Hill must have
been a mess with them squashed melons. I didn't stop the team till I got
out of sight of town. Then I pulled up an' left 'em with a rancher I was
acquainted with, and I never went home to get the lickin' that was
waitin' for me. I expect it's waitin' for me yet."

Thea rolled over in the sand. "Oh, I wish I could have seen those melons
fly, Ray! I'll never see anything as funny as that. Now, tell Johnny
about your first job."

Ray had a collection of good stories. He was observant, truthful, and
kindly--perhaps the chief requisites in a good story-teller.
Occasionally he used newspaper phrases, conscientiously learned in his
efforts at self-instruction, but when he talked naturally he was always
worth listening to. Never having had any schooling to speak of, he had,
almost from the time he first ran away, tried to make good his loss. As
a sheep-herder he had worried an old grammar to tatters, and read
instructive books with the help of a pocket dictionary. By the light of
many camp-fires he had pondered upon Prescott's histories, and the works
of Washington Irving, which he bought at a high price from a book-agent.
Mathematics and physics were easy for him, but general culture came
hard, and he was determined to get it. Ray was a freethinker, and
inconsistently believed himself damned for being one. When he was
braking, down on the Santa Fe, at the end of his run he used to climb
into the upper bunk of the caboose, while a noisy gang played poker
about the stove below him, and by the roof-lamp read Robert Ingersoll's
speeches and "The Age of Reason."

Ray was a loyal-hearted fellow, and it had cost him a great deal to give
up his God. He was one of the stepchildren of Fortune, and he had very
little to show for all his hard work; the other fellow always got the
best of it. He had come in too late, or too early, on several schemes
that had made money. He brought with him from all his wanderings a good
deal of information (more or less correct in itself, but unrelated, and
therefore misleading), a high standard of personal honor, a se