Tusky kep' the fire goin' and
I rustled greasewood. We cooked her three days and three nights. At
the end of that time she was sort of pale and frazzled, but still
givin' points to three-year-old jerky on cohesion and other
uncompromisin' forces of Nature. We buried her then, and went out back
to recuperate.

There we could gaze on the smilin' landscape, dotted by about four
hundred long-laigged chickens swoopin' here and there after
grasshoppers.

"We got to stop that," says I.

"We can't," murmured Tusky, inspired. "We can't. It's born in 'em;
it's a primal instinct, like the love of a mother for her young, and it
can't be eradicated! Them chickens is constructed by a divine
providence for the express purpose of chasin' grasshoppers, jest as the
beaver is made for buildin' dams, and the cow-puncher is made for
whisky and faro-games. We can't keep 'em from it. If we was to shut
'em in a dark cellar, they'd flop after imaginary grasshoppers in their
dreams, and die emaciated in the midst of plenty. Jimmy, we're up agin
the Cosmos, the oversoul--" Oh, he had the medicine tongue, Tusky had,
and risin' on the wings of eloquence that way, he had me faded in ten
minutes. In fifteen I was wedded solid to the notion that the bottom
had dropped out of the chicken business. I think now that if we'd shut
them hens up, we might have--still, I don't know; they was a good deal
in what Tusky said.

"Tuscarora Maxillary," says I, "did you ever stop to entertain that
beautiful thought that if all the dumfoolishness possessed now by the
human race could be gathered together, and lined up alongside of us,
the first feller to come along would say to it 'Why, hello, Solomon!'"

We quit the notion of chickens for profit right then and there, but we
couldn't quit the place. We hadn't much money, for one thing, and then
we, kind of liked loafin' around and raisin' a little garden truck,
and--oh, well, I might as well say so, we had a notion about placers in
the dry wash back of the house you know how it is. So we stayed on,
and kept a-raisin' these long-laigs for the fun of it. I used to like
to watch 'em projectin' around, and I fed 'em twict a day about as
usual.

So Tusky and I lived alone there together, happy as ducks in Arizona.
About onc't in a month somebody'd pike along the road. She wasn't much
of a road, generally more chuckholes than bumps, though sometimes it
was the other way around. Unless it happened to