ement many times and in many forms. He
declaimed it all the way up the path to the dugout, and when they were
standing outside. Beyond all else, Casey was anxious that Joe should
feel perfectly certain that he, Casey Ryan, knew what he was doing,
knew what he was saying, and that his head was and always had been
perr-rf'c'ly level-l-l.

"Jus' t' prove-it--I c'n kill that jack-over-there--without-no-gun!"
Casey bragged bubblingly, running his words together as if they were
being poured in muddy liquid from his mouth. "B'lieve it?
Think-I-can't?"

The three turned circumspectly and stared solemnly at a gray burro with
a crippled front leg that had limped to the dump heap within easy
throwing distance from the cabin door. Hobbling on three legs it went
nosing painfully amongst a litter of tin cans and bent paper cartons,
hunting garbage. As if conscious that it was being talked about, the
burro lifted its head and eyed the four mournfully, its ears loosely
flopping.

"How?" questioned Paw, waggling his beard disparagingly. "Spit 'n 'is
eye?"

"Talk 'm t' death," Hank guessed with imbecile shrewdness.

"Think-I-can't? What'll--y'bet?"

They disputed the point with drunken insistence and mild imprecations,
Hank and Paw and Joe at various times siding impartially for and
against Casey. Casey gathered the impression that none of them
believed him. They seemed to think he didn't know what he was talking
about. They even questioned the fact that his head was level. He felt
that his honor was at stake and that his reputation as a truthful man
and a level-headed man was threatened.

While they wrangled, the fingers of Casey's right hand fumbled
unobserved in the sling on his left, twisting together the two short
lengths of fuse so that he might light both as one piece. Even in his
drunkenness Casey knew dynamite and how best to handle it. Judgment
might be dethroned, but the mechanical details of his profession were
grooved deep into habit and were observed automatically and without the
aid of conscious thought.

He braced himself against the dugout wall and raised his hand to the
cigarette he had with some trouble rolled and lighted. A spitting
splutter arose, that would have claimed the attention of the three, had
they not been unanimously engaged in trying to out-talk one another
upon the subject of Casey's ability to kill a burro seventy-five feet
away without a gun.

Casey glanced at them cunningly, d