JOHNSON

Dry Valley Johnson shook the bottle. You have to shake the bottle
before using; for sulphur will not dissolve. Then Dry Valley saturated
a small sponge with the liquid and rubbed it carefully into the roots
of his hair. Besides sulphur there was sugar of lead in it and
tincture of nux vomica and bay rum. Dry Valley found the recipe in a
Sunday newspaper. You must next be told why a strong man came to fall
a victim to a Beauty Hint.

Dry Valley had been a sheepman. His real name was Hector, but he had
been rechristened after his range to distinguish him from "Elm Creek"
Johnson, who ran sheep further down the Frio.

Many years of living face to face with sheep on their own terms
wearied Dry Valley Johnson. So, he sold his ranch for eighteen
thousand dollars and moved to Santa Rosa to live a life of gentlemanly
ease. Being a silent and melancholy person of thirty-five--or perhaps
thirty-eight--he soon became that cursed and earth-cumbering thing--an
elderlyish bachelor with a hobby. Some one gave him his first
strawberry to eat, and he was done for.

Dry Valley bought a four-room cottage in the village, and a library on
strawberry culture. Behind the cottage was a garden of which he made a
strawberry patch. In his old grey woolen shirt, his brown duck
trousers, and high-heeled boots he sprawled all day on a canvas cot
under a live-oak tree at his back door studying the history of the
seductive, scarlet berry.

The school teacher, Miss De Witt, spoke of him as "a fine, presentable
man, for all his middle age." But, the focus of Dry Valley's eyes
embraced no women. They were merely beings who flew skirts as a signal
for him to lift awkwardly his heavy, round-crowned, broad-brimmed felt
Stetson whenever he met them, and then hurry past to get back to his
beloved berries.

And all this recitative by the chorus is only to bring us to the point
where you may be told why Dry Valley shook up the insoluble sulphur in
the bottle. So long-drawn and inconsequential a thing is history--the
anamorphous shadow of a milestone reaching down the road between us
and the setting sun.

When his strawberries were beginning to ripen Dry Valley bought the
heaviest buggy whip in the Santa Rosa store. He sat for many hours
under the live oak tree plaiting and weaving in an extension to its
lash. When it was done he could snip a leaf from a bush twenty feet
away with the cracker. For the bright, predatory eyes of Santa Rosa
youth