es later a dusty limousine stopped for gas and oil, and Casey
left his work to wait upon them. There was a very good-looking girl
driving, and the man beside her was undoubtedly only her father, and Casey
was humanly anxious to be remembered pleasantly when they drove on. He
asked them to wait and have a drink of cold water, and was deeply
humiliated to find that both water bags were empty,--the overgrown girl
having used the last to wash her face. Casey didn't like her any the
better for that, or for having accentuated the high-water mark, or for
forcing him to apologize to the pretty driver of the limousine.

He refilled the water bags and remarked pointedly that it would take an
hour for the water to cool in them and that they must be left alone in the
meantime. He did not look at the girl, but from the tail of his eye he saw
her pull a contemptuous grimace at him when she thought his back safely
turned.

Wherefore Casey finished the putting on of the fourth tire pretty well up
toward the boiling point in temper and in blood. I have not mentioned half
the disagreeable trifles that nagged at him during the interval,--his
audience, for instance, that hovered so close that he could not get up
without colliding with one of them, so full of aimless talk that he
mislaid tools in his distraction. Juan was a pest and Casey thought
malevolently how he would kill him when the job was finished. Juan went
around like one in a trance, his heavy-lidded, opaque eyes following every
movement of the girl, which kept her younger sisters giggling. But even
with interruptions and practically no assistance the truck stood at last
with four good tires on its wheels, and Casey wiped a perspiring face and
let down the jack, thankful that the job was done; thinking, too, that ten
dollars would be a big reduction on the price. He had to count his time,
you see.

"Well, how much does it come to, mister?" the lord of the flock asked
dolefully, when Casey called him in and told him that he could go at any
time now.

Casey told him, and made the price only five dollars lower than the full
amount, just because he hated to see men walk around loose in their pants,
with their stomachs sagged in as though they never were fed a square meal
in their lives.

"It's a pile uh money to pay out for rubber that's goin' to be chewed off
on these here danged rocks," sighed the man.

Casey grunted and began collecting his tools, rescuing the best hammer h