Jabez had let the silkworms die—an' I told him what I thought of him, an' pulled out. It was cold weather an' I was travelin' on foot, but it wasn't cold I was suffer in' from, it was heat.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IN RETIREMENT
I plugged along through the cold, gettin' hotter an' hotter all the time, 'cause I didn't want to go away at all. Barbie'd be home in a few months and I wanted to be there when she came—but I couldn't get over those silkworms. She was goin' to write somethin' about 'em for some kind of a paper, an' it meant a good deal to her, an' I had kept a record of all the projec's she'd written me to do with 'em—only to have Cast Steel an' flint fool Bill Andrews flounder in with that herd o' cows.
I piked on over to Danders thinkin' I'd get on a train an' go somewhere; but on my way there I met the foreman o' the E. Z. outfit ridin' into town to see if he couldn't pick up a fence-rider. Then I see old Mrs. Fate nudgin' me in the ribs with her finger again. We was all down on fences at the Diamond Dot. Jabez said that as far as he was concerned, he preferred to have his fences mounted on hoss-back, 'cause they was easiest moved, an' we didn't have a foot o' wire on the place. I knew that no one would ever think o' me ridin' fence, so I just up an' spoke for the job. The foreman, Hank Midders was his name, didn't know me an' he was suspicious of me bein' on foot. "Can you ride?" sez he.
"I used to could," sez I. "How many days' ridin' does it take to go around?"
"We don't ride that way," sez he, "we put two men in a camp an' they ride out fifteen miles an' then double back."
"They waste the return trip," sez I.
"We think different," sez he. "We keep a big run o' cows, an' we want the whole fence rode twice a day. We allus have plenty o' good ridin' ponies."