A new tongue would mean delay; and delay, in his present mood, was tragedy.
He couldn't find any old baling wire, though he had long been accustomed to tangling his feet in snarled bunches of it when he went forth in the dark after a high wind.

Until now he had not observed its unwonted absence from the yard.

For a long while he had not needed any wire to mend things, because Luck had attended to everything about the ranch, and if anything needed mending he had set one of the Happy Family at the task.
His search led him out beyond the corrals in the little dry wash that sometimes caught and held what the high winds brought rolling that way.
The wash was half filled with tumble-weed, so that Applehead was forced to get down into it and kick the weeds aside to see if there was any wire lodged beneath.

His temper did not sweeten over the task, especially since he found nothing that he wanted.
Annie-Many-Ponies, riding surreptitiously up the dry wash--meaning to come out in a farther gully and so approach the corral from the west instead of from the east--came upon Applehead quite unexpectedly.

She stopped and eyed him aslant from under her level, finely marked brows, and her eyes lightened with relief when she saw that Applehead looked more startled than she had felt.