Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/216

 poetry you used to have?" Dan inquired.

"That's what I want more than anything," Fred admitted. "If them works gits lost I'm in a hell of a fix! I've been savin' up them poems for twenty-seven years. Suppose that fat old Teresa took 'em to start her fire with!"

Without wasting any further time in words, the three of them saddled and set out on the rescue of the poems. Dan protested mildly when Fred mounted with the shotgun in his hand.

"Yes, I'm goin' to take it," said Fred, with admirable firmness for a poet, "and I'm a goin' to use it if we meet a pack of wolves. I'm a granger, I ain't no fightin' man; the rules don't bind me. Maybe a shotgun ain't regular, but it's purty dam' sure."

"Oh well, if it's wolves you're lookin' for," Dan yielded.

The moon came up, yellow as a candle flame, its benignant face suffused in the mists which hovered on the horizon edge. It was two or three days past the full, its under edge beginning to show a break in the circle. From the way Fred Grubb gazed at it as he rode, Barrett expected some tribute in verse to spill at any moment.

"That there moon makes me, think of an old flat grindin' stone I used to have to turn when I was a boy," said Fred. "Every time it come around to the flat place with my paw bearin' down on the scythe-blade, it made me hump my back and grunt."

This was so unexpected, and at such ridiculous distance from what he had primed his ear to hear, that