denly just how important a
part his arms play in the most simple of body movements; Andy, with his
arms pinioned tightly the whole length of them, rolled over on his face,
kicked a good deal, and rolled back again, but he did not sit up, as he
had confidently expected to do.

He lay absolutely quiet for at least five minutes, staring up at the
brilliant blue arch above him. Then he began to speak rapidly and
earnestly; a man just close enough to hear his voice sweeping up to a
certain rhetorical climax, pausing there and commencing again with a
rhythmic fluency of intonation, might have thought that he was repeating
poetry; indeed, it sounded like some of Milton's majestic blank
verse, but it was not. Andy was engaged in a methodical, scientific,
reprehensibly soul-satisfying period of swearing.

A curlew, soaring low, with long beak outstretched before him, and
long legs outstretched behind cast a beady eye upon him, and shrilled
"Cor-reck! Cor-reck!" in unregenerate approbation of the blasphemy.

Andy stopped suddenly and laughed. "Glad you agree with me, old sport,"
he addressed the bird whimsically, with a reaction to his normally
cheerful outlook. "Sheepherders are all those things I named over,
birdie, and some that I can't think of at present."

He tried again, this time with a more careful realization of his
limitations, to assume an upright position; and being a persevering
young man, and one with a ready wit, he managed at length to wriggle
himself back upon the slope from which he had slid in his sleep, and, by
digging in his heels and going carefully, he did at last rise upon his
knees, and from there triumphantly to his feet.

He had at first believed that one of the herders would, in the course
of an hour or so, return and untie him, when he hoped to be able to
retrieve, in a measure, his self-respect, which he had lost when the
first three feet of his own rope had encircled him. To be tied and
trussed by sheepherders! Andy gritted his teeth and started down the
coulee.

He was hungry, and his lunch was tied to his saddle. He looked eagerly
down the coulee, in the faint hope of seeing his horse grazing somewhere
along its length, until the numbness of his arms and hands reminded him
that forty lunches, tied upon forty saddles at his side, would be of no
use to him in his present position. His hands he could not move from his
thighs; he could wiggle his fingers--which he did, to relieve as much
as po