come with an excuse to get Mr. Gowdy away from
me--or after a couple of weeks' thinking, was it from Rowena? Yet Mr.
Gowdy did see Mr. Mobley that evening; for the next morning Mobley put
me over a gang of eight breaking-teams, "To handle the way you told Mr.
Gowdy last night," he said.

He was a tall, limber-jointed, whipped-looking man with a red nose and a
long stringy mustache, and always wore his vest open clear down to the
lower button which was fastened, and thus his whole waistcoat was thrown
open so as to show a tobacco-stained shirt bosom. The Missourian whom I
had noticed at table said that this was done so that the wearer of the
vest could reach his dirk handily. But Mobley was the last man I should
have suspected of carrying a dirk, or if he did packing the gumption
to use it.

I made good with my gang, and did a third more than any other eight
teams on the place. Before I went away, Gowdy talked around as if he
wanted me for overseer; but I couldn't decide without studying a long
time, to take a step so far from what I had been thinking of, and he
dropped the subject. I did not like the way things were going there. The
men were out of control. They despised Mobley, and said sly things about
his using his wife to keep him in a job. One day I told Magnus
Thorkelson about Mrs. Mobley's coming and taking Gowdy away from the
little cabin of the Fewkes family.

"She do dat," said he, "a dozen times ven Ay bane dar. She alvays bane
chasing Buck Gowdy."

"Well," I said, "who be you chasing, coming over here a dozen times when
I didn't know it? That's why you bought that mustang pony, eh?"

"I yust go over," said he, squirming, "to help Surajah fix up his
machines--his inwentions. Sometimes I take over de wyolin to play for
Rowena. Dat bane all, Yake."

When we went home, I with money enough for some new clothes, with what I
had by me, we caught a ride with one of Judge Stone's teams to a point
two-thirds of the way to Monterey Centre, and came into our own places
from the south. We were both glad to see long black streaks of new
breaking in the section of which my eighty was a part, and two new
shanties belonging to new neighbors. This would bring cultivated land up
to my south line, and I afterward found out, take the whole half of the
section into the new farms. The Zenas Smith family had moved on to the
southwest quarter, and the J.P. Roebuck family on the southeast.

The Smiths and Roebucks still live