"You were saying recently that perfect systems of oral if not verbal communication existed among mules, and that you had listened for hours to their gossip.
Give me the history of one of your freighting trips and what befell along the trail; and don't forget the comment thereon--wise, doubtless, it was--of your long-eared servants of the rein and trace-chain." "Tell you what chances along the trail?
Son, you-all opens a wide-flung range for my mem'ry to graze over.

I might tell you how I'm lost once, freightin' from Vegas into the Panhandle, an' am two days without water--blazin' Jooly days so hot you couldn't touch tire, chain, or bolt-head without fryin' your fingers.

An' how at the close of the second day when I hauls in at Cabra Springs, I lays down by that cold an' blessed fountain an' drinks till I aches.

Which them two days of thirst terrorises me to sech degrees that for one plumb year tharafter, I never meets up with water when I don't drink a quart, an' act like I'm layin' in ag'in another parched spell.
"Or I might relate how I stops over one night from Springer on my way to the Canadian at a Triangle-dot camp called Kingman.

This yere is a one-room stone house, stark an' sullen an' alone on the desolate plains, an' no scenery worth namin' but a half-grown feeble spring.