rtunately put away in the car out of the reach of a hill of
industrious red ants.

He thought vaguely of cranking the car and going on, but gave up the
notion. One sidehill, he decided, was as good as another sidehill for
the present.

That night Casey slept fitfully in the car and discovered that even a
wall bed in a despised apartment house may be more comfortable than the
front seat of a Ford. His bones ached by morning, and he was hungry
enough to eat raw bacon and relish it. But the sun was fighting through
the piled clouds and shone cheerfully upon the draggled pass, and Casey
boiled coffee and fried bacon and bannock beside the trail, and for a
little while was happy again.

From breakfast until noon he was busy as a beaver repairing the washout
beneath the car and on to the top of the hill. She was going to have to
get down and dig in her toes to make it, he told the Ford, when at last
he heaved pick and shovel into the tonneau, packed in his cooking
outfit and made ready to crank up.

From then until supper time he wore a trail around the car, looking to
see what was wrong and why he could not crank. He removed
hootin'-annies and dingbats (using Casey's mechanical terms) looked
them over dissatisfiedly, and put them back without having done them ny
good whatever. Sometimes they were returned to a different place, I
imagine, since I know too well how impartial Casey is with the
mechanical parts of a Ford.

He made camp there that night, pitching his little tent in the trail
for pure cussedness, and defying aloud a traveling world to make him
move until he got good and ready. He might have saved his vocabulary,
for the road was impassable before him and behind; and had Casey
managed to start the car, he could not have driven a mile in either
direction.

Since he did not know that, the next day he painstakingly cleaned the
spark plugs and tried again to crank the Ford; couldn't, and removed
more hootin'-annies and dingbats than he had touched the day before.
That night he once more pitched his tent in the trail, hoping in his
heart that some one would drive along and dispute his right to camp
there; when he would lick the doggone cuss.

On the fourth day, after a long, fatiguing session with the vitals of a
Ford that refused to be cranked, Casey was busy gathering brush, for
his supper fire when Fate came walking up' the trail. Fate appears in
many forms. In this instance it assumed the shape of a