d and sent it ahead again at a faster pace.

"Well, now, any time yuh see CASEY RYAN settin' with a shawl over his
shoulders--"

"Well, maybe not YOU; but the bird sure comes to it that thinks he's
too old to play the game. Why, you'll never be ready to settle down!
Take yuh twenty years from now--I'd rather bank on a pardner like you'd
be than some young clown that ain't had the experience. From the yarns
I've heard about yuh, yuh don't back down from nothing. And you're
willing to give a pardner a chance to get away with his hide on him.
I'd rather be held up by the law than by some clown that's workin' with
me."

He paused; and when he, spoke again his tone had changed to meet a
prosaic detail of the drive.

"Stop here in Victorville, will yuh, Casey? I'll take a look at the
radiator and maybe take on some more gas and oil. I've been stuck on
the desert a few times with an empty tank--and that learns a guy to
keep the top of his gas tank full and never mind the bottom."

"Good idea," said Casey shortly, his own tone relaxing its tension of a
few minutes before. "I run a garage over at Patmos once, an' the boobs
I seen creepin' in on their last spoonful uh gas--walkin' sometimes for
miles to carry gas back to where they was stalled--learnt Casey Ryan to
fill 'er up every chancet he gits."

But although the subject of age had been dropped half a mile back in
the sand, certain phrases flung at him had been barbed and had bitten
deep into Casey Ryan's self-esteem. They stung and rankled there. He
had squirmed at the picture his new friend had so ruthlessly drawn with
crude words, but bold, of doddering old age. Casey resented the
implication that he might one day fill that picture.

He began vaguely to resent the Little Woman's air of needing to protect
him from himself. Casey Ryan, he told himself boastfully, had never
needed protection from anybody. He had managed for a good many years
to get along on his own hook. The Little Woman was all right, but she
was making a mistake--a big mistake--if she thought she had to
close-herd him to keep him out of trouble.

He rolled a smoke and wished that the Little Woman would settle down
with him somewhere in the desert, where he could keep a couple of
burros and go prospecting in the hills. Where sagebrush could grow to
their very door if it wanted to, and the moon could show them long
stretches of mesa land shadowed with mystery, and then drop out of
sight