gin to hire herders or depend on strangers things
would go wrong. With the assistance of her sons, she therefore managed the
entire details of the herd, with the exception of those occasions on which
Leander lent his semi-professional co-operation.

As a workman Leander was, considering his size and apparent weakness,
surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological doctrine
that Mrs. Dax's husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed from his
wife's masterful presence, Leander dared to be an "agnostic," as he called
himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His iconoclasm was not of a
pattern with paw's gusty protests against life in general, but it was
Leander's way of asserting himself, on the rare occasions when he got a
chance, to deny clamorously every tenet advanced by every religion. The
mere use of certain familiar expletives drove him, ordinarily mild and
submissive though he was, to frantic gesticulation and diatribe. Mary
Carmichael could not make out, as she watched the comedy with growing
amusement, whether poor Leander really believed that he was the first of
doubting Thomases, or whether he took an unfair advantage of the lack of
general information in his casual audiences to set forth well-known
opinions as his own. Whatever its basis may have been, Leander sustained
the role of doubter with passionate zeal, wearing himself to tatters of
rage and hoarseness over arguments maliciously contrived beforehand by
cow-punchers and sheep-herders in need of amusement; and yet he never saw
the traps, going out of his way, apparently, to fall into them, tumbling
headlong into the identical pits time after time. Jonah and the whale
constituted one bait by means of which Leander could be lured from food,
sleep, or work of the most pressing nature.

"The poor fool would stop in the middle of shearing a sheep to argue that
Jonah never come out of the whale's belly," the matriarch had told Mary
Carmichael, in summing up Leander's disadvantages as a herder. And the
first remark she had addressed to him on his arrival was: "Leander Dax,
you'd have to be made over, and made different, to keep you from bein' a
infidel, but there's one p'int on which you are particularly locoed, and
that's Jonah and the whale. Now at this particular time in the hist'ry of
the United States, nobody in his faculties has got no call to fret hisself
over Jonah and his whereabouts--none whatever. There's a lot of business
r