As if they had been waiting for a leader, the others rose also and prepared to depart. Polycarp proceeded, in his usual laborious manner, to draw his tobacco from his pocket, and pry off a corner.
“Why don't you burn them guards now, Manley, while you got plenty of help?” he suggested, turning his slit-lidded eyes toward the kitchen door, where Val appeared for an instant to reach the broom which stood outside.
“Because I don't want to,” snapped Manley: “I've got plenty to do without that.”
“Well, they ain't wide enough, nor long enough, and they don't run in the right direction—if you ask me.” Polycarp spat solemnly off to the right.
“I don't ask you, as it happens.” Manley turned and went into the home.
Polycarp looked quizzically at the closed door. “He's mighty touchy about them guards, for a feller that thinks they're all right—he-he!” he remarked, to no one in particular. “Some of these days, by granny, he'll wisht he'd took my advice!”
Since no one gave him the slightest attention, Polycarp did not pursue the subject further. Instead, with both ears open to catch all that was said, he trailed after the others to the corral. It was a matter of instinct, as well as principle, with Polycarp Jenks, to let no sentence, however trivial, slip past his hearing and his memory.
CHAPTER VIII. THE PRAIRIE FIRE
A calamity expected, feared, and guarded against by a whole community does sometimes occur, and with a suddenness which finds the victims unprepared in spite of all their elaborate precautions. Compared with the importance of saving the range from fire, it was but a trivial thing which took nearly every man who dwelt in Lonesome Land to town on a certain day when the wind blew free from out the west. They were weary of watching for the fire which did not come licking through the prairie grass, and a special campaign train bearing a prospective President of our United States was expected to pass through Hope that afternoon.