een roast
beef and chicken, and so he waived the question by taking both; and what
with the biscuits and butter, apple-sauce and blackberry jam, cherry pie
and milk like cream, there was danger of making himself ill. He told
his friends that he simply could not help it, which shameless confession
brought a hearty laugh from August and beaming smiles from his
women-folk.

For several days Hare was remarkably well, for an invalid. He won golden
praise from August at the rifle practice, and he began to take lessons
in the quick drawing and rapid firing of a Colt revolver. Naab was
wonderfully proficient in the use of both firearms; and his skill in
drawing the smaller weapon, in which his movement was quicker than the
eye, astonished Hare. "My lad," said August, "it doesn't follow because
I'm a Christian that I don't know how to handle a gun. Besides, I like
to shoot."

In these few days Hare learned what conquering the desert made of a man.
August Naab was close to threescore years; his chest was wide as a door,
his arm like the branch of an oak. He was a blacksmith, a mechanic, a
carpenter, a cooper, a potter. At his forge and in his shop, everywhere,
were crude tools, wagons, farming implements, sets of buckskin harness,
odds and ends of nameless things, eloquent and pregnant proof of the
fact that necessity is the mother of invention. He was a mason; the
levee that buffeted back the rage of the Colorado in flood, the wall
that turned the creek, the irrigation tunnel, the zigzag trail cut on
the face of the cliff--all these attested his eye for line, his judgment
of distance, his strength in toil. He was a farmer, a cattle man,
a grafter of fruit-trees, a breeder of horses, a herder of sheep, a
preacher, a physician. Best and strangest of all in this wonderful man
was the instinct and the heart to heal. "I don't combat the doctrine of
the Mormon church," he said, "but I administer a little medicine with my
healing. I learned that from the Navajos." The children ran to him with
bruised heads, and cut fingers, and stubbed toes; and his blacksmith's
hands were as gentle as a woman's. A mustang with a lame leg claimed his
serious attention; a sick sheep gave him an anxious look; a steer with a
gored skin sent him running for a bucket of salve. He could not pass
by a crippled quail. The farm was overrun by Navajo sheep which he had
found strayed and lost on the desert. Anything hurt or helpless had
in August Naab a friend.