ween the pickets, keeping tabs on the reddening berries.

Late one afternoon Dry Valley went to the post office. When he came
back, like Mother Hubbard he found the deuce to pay. The descendants
of Iberian bandits and Hibernian cattle raiders had swooped down upon
his strawberry patch. To the outraged vision of Dry Valley there
seemed to be a sheep corral full of them; perhaps they numbered five
or six. Between the rows of green plants they were stooped, hopping
about like toads, gobbling silently and voraciously his finest fruit.

Dry Valley slipped into the house, got his whip, and charged the
marauders. The lash curled about the legs of the nearest--a greedy
ten-year-old--before they knew they were discovered. His screech
gave warning; and the flock scampered for the fence like a drove of
_javelis_ flushed in the chaparral. Dry Valley's whip drew a toll of
two more elfin shrieks before they dived through the vine-clad fence
and disappeared.

Dry Valley, less fleet, followed them nearly to the pickets. Checking
his useless pursuit, he rounded a bush, dropped his whip and stood,
voiceless, motionless, the capacity of his powers consumed by the act
of breathing and preserving the perpendicular.

Behind the bush stood Panchita O'Brien, scorning to fly. She was
nineteen, the oldest of the raiders. Her night-black hair was gathered
back in a wild mass and tied with a scarlet ribbon. She stood, with
reluctant feet, yet nearer the brook than to the river; for childhood
had environed and detained her.

She looked at Dry Valley Johnson for a moment with magnificent
insolence, and before his eyes slowly crunched a luscious berry
between her white teeth. Then she turned and walked slowly to the
fence with a swaying, conscious motion, such as a duchess might make
use of in leading a promenade. There she turned again and grilled Dry
Valley Johnson once more in the dark flame of her audacious eyes,
laughed a trifle school-girlishly, and twisted herself with pantherish
quickness between the pickets to the O'Brien side of the wild gourd
vine.

Dry Valley picked up his whip and went into his house. He stumbled as
he went up the two wooden steps. The old Mexican woman who cooked his
meals and swept his house called him to supper as he went through the
rooms. Dry Valley went on, stumbled down the front steps, out the gate
and down the road into a mesquite thicket at the edge of town. He sat
down in the grass and laboriously pluck