alled
affectionately by the name Maud. The biggest girl had Maud. She had turned
it upright on its handle and was sitting on the head of it. When Casey
reached for it and got it, without apology or warning, the girl sprawled
backward and howled.

"Porshea, you git up from there! _Shame_ on yuh!" A shrill woman voice,
very much like the younger voices except that it was worn rough and
querulous with age and many hardships, called down from the truck. Casey
looked up, startled, and tried to remember just what he had said before
the girls appeared to silence him. The woman was very large both in height
and in bulk, and she was heaving herself out of the truck in a way that
reminded Casey oddly of a disgruntled hippopotamus he had once watched
coming out of its tank at a circus. Casey moved modestly away and did not
look, after that first glance. A truck, you will please understand, is not
a touring car, and ladies who have passed the two-hundred-pound notch on
the scales should remain up there and call for a step-ladder.

She descended, and the jack slipped and let the car down with a six-inch
lurch. Casey is remarkably quick in his motions. He turned, jumped three
feet and caught the lady's full weight in his arms as she was falling
toward him. Probably he would have caught it anyway, but then there would
have been little left of Casey, and his troubles would have been finished
instead of being just begun.

He had just straightened the jack and was beginning to lift the bare wheel
off the ground again when the fifth offspring descended. Casey thought
again of the hippopotamus in its infancy. The fifth was perhaps fifteen,
but she had apparently reached her full growth, which was very nearly that
of her mother. She had also reached the age of self-consciousness, and she
simpered at Casey when he assisted her to alight.

Casey was not bashful, nor was he over-fastidious; men who have lived long
in the wilderness are not, as a rule. Still, he had his little whims, and
he failed to react to the young lady's smile. His pale blue eyes were keen
to observe details and even Casey did not approve of "high-water marks" on
feminine beauty.

Well, that brought the whole family to view save the youngest who had
evidently dropped asleep and was left in the truck. Casey went to work on
the wheel again, after directing mother and daughter to the desert water
bag which swung suspended from ropes in the rear of the garage.

Ten minut