corner,
stopping now and then to knock the ashes from his pipe, or to put some
brief query. Jud and Ump had come in from the old man's log stable,
throwing their saddles down by the door and spreading the bridles out on
the hearth so that the iron bits would be warm in the morning.

"How will the day be to-morrow?" I asked of the waggon-maker.

"Dry," he responded; "great rains in the mountains, but none here for a
week; then storms."

"Isn't it early for the storms?"

"Yes," he answered; "but the wild geese have gone over, and the storms
follow."

Then he asked me where we were riding, and I explained that we were
going to bring up Ward's cattle from beyond the Valley River. He said
that we would find dry roads but high rivers. The gates of the mountains
would be gushing with rains. The old man studied the fire.

Presently he said, "Mr. Ward is a good man. I have seen him buy a poor
scoundrel's heifers and wink his eye when the scoundrel salted them the
night before they were weighed, and then drove them to the scales in the
morning around by the water trough."

I laughed. This was a trick originated long ago by one Columbus, an old
grazing thief of the Rock Ford country, who went ever afterward by the
name of "Water Lum." It was a terrible breach of the cattle code.

Again the old man relapsed into silence. His eyes ran over the shoulders
of the big Jud who squatted by the fire, sewing his broken bridle reins
with a shoemaker's wax-end.

"Are you the strong man?" he said.

The giant chuckled and grinned and drew out the end of his thread.

"Well," continued the waggon-maker, "Mr. Ward spoiled a mighty good
blacksmith when he put you on a horse." Then he turned to me. "Is he the
one that throwed Woodford's club-footed nigger in the wrastle at Roy's
tavern?"

"Yes," I said, "but one time it was a dog-fall, and Lem Marks says that
Malan slipped the other time."

"But he didn't slip," put in Jud. "He tried to lift me, an' I
knee-locked him. Then I could a throwed him if he'd been as big as a
Polled-Angus heifer."

"Was you wrastling back-holts or breeches-holts?" asked old Simon,
getting up from his chair.

"Back-holts," replied Jud.

The waggon-maker nodded his head. Doubtless in the early time he had
occasion to learn the respective virtues of these two celebrated
methods.

"That's best if your back's best," he said; "but I reckon you ain't
willing to let it go with a dog-fall. You might get anoth