“Ralph has been very naughty.”
“He’ll come out all right; don’t you go to worrying about him, Miss Jessie,” Mr. Wilson admonished her, cheerfully. “He’s nothing but a baby, anyway,” he continued, “but what even a baby can want of all those little green knobs of cantaloupes is more’n I can tell, but seeing ’em calls to my mind a fruit speculation of mine, last summer.”
“I thought you were a cattleman?” I interrupted, involuntarily.
Mr. Wilson glanced down at the pail beside his chair. “Well, I am, Leslie, but a cattleman doesn’t have to be sensible all the time. I had a kind of spell last summer when I wasn’t sensible, and while it was at its height I got hold of a pile of young tomato plants and set ’em out. You see, as everybody else, pretty nigh, is in the cattle business, too, there ain’t much fruit raised around here, and so I ’lowed I’d be able to dispose of my tomato crop to good advantage. Along in August the crop was ready to market, and it was a hummer, no mistake. The construction gang and the engineers were working on the big storage reservoirs out beyond Turtle Shell Buttes then, just as they are now. There’s a lot of men employed there and I knew that there was the place to go with my tomatoes.”
“What, away out on the plains, beyond the valley? That must be twenty miles away,” Jessie remarked, as Mr. Wilson paused to chuckle over some amusing reminiscence.
“It’s all of that; maybe more. But you must remember that driving over the plains is like driving over a level floor. Distance doesn’t count for much when the roads are always smooth and even. Well; one afternoon Tom and I filled the bottom of the wagon-box with a soft bed of fresh alfalfa hay and then we piled tomatoes in on top of it till they came clean up to the edge of the top bed. Of course if the roads had been rough it ain’t likely that even a cattleman would ’a’ thought of taking such a load in that way; as it was, I reckon there wasn’t a tomato smashed in transit. I didn’t get quite as early a start as I’d ’lowed to, so it was just noon when I reached the camp.”
“I should have thought that you would lose the way,” I said. My mind had conjured up a vivid picture of the far stretches of unfenced plains that lay between our mountain-walled valley and the great water storage system where a single lake already sparkled like a white jewel on the gray waste of plains. “There are wolves, too,” I added, suddenly.
“Yes; there are wolves, but they don’t eat tomatoes. And, as for losing the road, all that I had to do was to follow it; it stretches out, plain as a white ribbon on a black dress. As I said, it was noon when I reached camp. All hands had struck work and gone to dinner, so I thought I’d wait till they got through before I sprung the subject of tomatoes on them.
“There ain’t a tree nor a shrub bigger than a soap weed within a mile of the reservoirs, and as I didn’t want to set and hold the horses all the time, I unhitched ’em and tied ’em to the wagon-box; one on each side. I knew that they wouldn’t eat the tomatoes, and, as there was plenty of horse feed in camp, I ’lowed to buy their dinner when I run on to some one to buy it of. It turned out, though, that the horses didn’t understand about that; they had a scheme of their own, and they worked it to good advantage.
“I strolled off, and pretty soon I got mighty interested in lookin’ at the works; it’s a big enterprise, I tell you! I was gone from the wagon a good deal longer than I’d laid out to be, and I don’t know as I’d ’a’ woke up for an hour or two, but I heard a fellow laughin’ over that way and so I went over to see what was goin’ on. Well, I found out.” Mr. Wilson paused impressively and glanced around at us. Joe was listening with such absorbed attention that his work had slipped unheeded from his hands and Ralph had again secured the harness needle and was awkwardly re-stringing his imitation sleigh bells. “What was it?” I asked.