isty
Zeekee" one of the greatest of Anglo-Saxons.

"You see," remarked Noah, picking up the lines again, "as my dad used
to say, 'He that taketh hold of the handles of a plow and looketh back,
verily, he shall be kicked by a mule.' I never calculate to be kicked
in the back. But if that Chinaman over there"--he frowned at a
Chinaboy who was fumbling over a cotton planter--"don't get a move on
him, he'll be kicked wherever he happens to hit my foot first. Hi,
there"--Noah threw up his head and yelled to the Chinaboy--"get a move
on. Plantee cotton. Goee like hellee." And the Chinaman did.

Bob laughed.

"Do you reckon you could let me have five dollars to-night?" Noah
Ezekiel asked, looking down at his plow. "I want to go up to the Red
Owl at Mexicali."

"Not going to gamble, are you?" Bob asked.

Noah Ezekiel shook his head. "No, I ain't goin' to gamble. Goin' to
invest the five in my education. I want to learn how many ways there
are for a fool and his money to part."

After supper, when Noah Ezekiel had ridden away to invest his five
dollars in the educational processes of the Red Owl, Bob brought a
stool out of the house and sat down to rest his tired muscles and watch
the coming night a little while before he turned in. Bob and his
foreman occupied the same shack--the term "house," as Noah Ezekiel
said, being merely a flower of speech. Although there were several
hundred thousand acres of very rich land under cultivation on the
Mexican side, with two or three exceptions there was not a house on any
of the ranches that two men could not have built in one day and still
observe union hours. Four willow poles driven in the ground, a few
crosspieces, a thatch of arrowweed, three strips of plank nailed round
the bottom, some mosquito netting, and it was done. A Chinaman would
take another day off and build a smoking adobe oven; but Bob and Noah
had a second-hand oil stove on which a Chinese boy did their cooking.

Bob sat and looked out over the level field in the dusk. A quarter of
a mile away the light glimmered in the hut of his Chinese help, and
there came the good-natured jabber of their supper activities. He felt
the expansive thrill of the planter, the employer--the man who
organizes an enterprise and makes it go.

The heat of the day was already gone, and pleasant coolness was on the
night wind that brought the smell of desert sage from beyond the
watered fields. Bob stirred from the chai