re the damage was done.

The official had given a snap judgement, and it led to disaster. It was
not his fault. The instructions are not clear. Nowhere in all the
verbiage does it say how big they have to be to be counted as people.

Manuel took Mula and went to work. His sector was the Santa Magdalena, a
scrap of bald-headed and desolate mountains, steep but not high, and so
torrid in the afternoons that it was said that the old lava sometimes
began to writhe and flow again from the sun's heat alone.

In the center valley there were five thousand acres of slag and
vitrified rock from some forgotten old blast that had melted the hills
and destroyed their mantle, reducing all to a terrible flatness. This
was called Sodom. It was strewn with low-lying ghosts as of people and
objects, formed when the granite bubbled like water.

Away from the dead center the ravines were body-deep in chaparral, and
the hillsides stood gray-green with old cactus. The stunted trees were
lower than the giant bushes and yucca.

Manuel went with Mula, a round easy man and a sparse gaunt mule. Mula
was a mule, but there were other inhabitants of the Santa Magdalena of a
genus less certain.

Yet even about Mula there was an oddity in her ancestry. Her paternal
grandfather had been a goat. Manuel once told Mr. Marshal about this,
but Mr. Marshal had not accepted it.

"She is a mule. Therefore, her father was a jack. Therefore his father
was also a jack, a donkey. It could not be any other way."

Manuel often wondered about that, for he had raised the whole strain of
animals, and he remembered who had been with whom.

"A donkey! A jack! Two feet tall and with a beard and horns. I always
thought that he was a goat."

Manuel and Mula stopped at noon on Lost Soul Creek. There would be no
travel in the hot afternoon. But Manuel had a job to do, and he did it.
He took the forms from one of the packs that he had unslung from Mula,
and counted out nine of them. He wrote down all the data on nine people.
He knew all there was to know about them, their nativities and their
antecedents. He knew that there were only nine regular people in the
nine hundred square miles of the Santa Magdalena.

But he was systematic, so he checked the list over again and again.
There seemed to be somebody missing. Oh, yes, himself. He got another
form and filled out all the data on himself.

Now, in one way of looking at it, his part in the census was finished.