142 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 



my friend's speech just went trailing off into 

 impotent stutterings. No, no, it wouldn't be 

 any trouble to drive 'em over ; all we'd have to 

 do would be to get 'em headed this way and 

 keep 'em a-comin'. They ought to make the 

 fifty miles over the woods trails in a couple of 

 days. And when I got 'em here and turned 

 'em onto a mess of sprouts, farming that land 

 after a year or so would be nothing but one 

 glad, sweet song. That's what the bulletin 

 said, too. There was no doubting it. 



My boy and I went after our goats in No- 

 vember, going in the saddle across the hills to 

 Carroll County. Louis rode Dick, our big 

 gray work-horse, and I had Jack, the big gray 

 mule that was Dick's harness mate. Those two 

 beasts were the Damon and Pythias of the 

 farm; the mule's devotion to Dick was idola- 

 trous ; in pasture or stable he clung to the horse 

 like his shadow; he was quite unmanageable 

 if they were a rod apart. That made a nice 

 state of things for handling a bunch of goats 

 in a wilderness of ragged, unfamiliar hill coun- 

 try. 



Never mind the preliminaries. Our goats 

 were delivered to us at the ranch gate in the 

 gray dawn of a crisp morning. The first thing 



