mer at my time of life as a temporary job. Will you stick
if we can swing the thing for you?"

"I will," said Jim, in the manner of a person taking the vows in some
solemn initiation.

"All right," said the colonel. "We'll keep quiet and see how many votes we
can muster up at the election. How many oan you speak for?"

Jim gave himself for a few minutes to thought. It was a new thing to him,
this matter of mustering votes--and a thing which he had always looked
upon as rather reprehensible. The citizen should go forth with no
coercion, no persuasion, no suggestion, and vote his sentiments.

"How many can you round up?" persisted the colonel.

"I think," said Jim, "that I can speak for myself and Old Man Simms!"

The colonel laughed.

"Fine politician!" he repeated. "Fine politician! Well, Jim, we may get
beaten in this, but if we are, let's not have them going away picking
their noses and saying they've had no fight. You round up yourself and Old
Man Simms and I'll see what I can do--I'll see what I can do!"

CHAPTER XV

A MINOR CASTS HALF A VOTE

March came in like neither a lion nor a lamb, but was scarcely a week old
before the wild ducks had begun to score the sky above Bronson's Slew
looking for open water and badly-harvested corn-fields. Wild geese, too,
honked from on high as if in wonder that these great prairies on which
their forefathers had been wont fearlessly to alight had been changed into
a disgusting expanse of farms. If geese are favored with the long lives in
which fable bids us believe, some of these venerable honkers must have
seen every vernal and autumnal phase of the transformation from boundless
prairie to boundless corn-land. I sometimes seem to hear in the
bewildering trumpetings of wild geese a cry of surprise and protest at the
ruin of their former paradise. Colonel Woodruff's hired man, Pete, had no
such foolish notions, however. He stopped Newton Bronson and Raymond Simms
as they tramped across the colonel's pasture, gun in hand, trying to make
themselves believe that the shooting was good.

"This ain't no country to hunt in," said he. "Did either of you fellows
ever have any real duck-shooting?"

"The mountings," said Raymond, "air poor places for ducks."

"Not big enough water," suggested Pete. "Some wood-ducks, I suppose?"

"Along the creeks and rivers, yes seh," said Raymond, "and sometimes a
flock of wild geese would get lost, and some bewildered, and a man would