withal, "if it was like a carburetor, and you could
give it a richer mixture --"

"Yeah. What do you make of it, Bud?"

"Well -- aw, there comes that durn colt, bringing
up the drag. Say Cash, that colt's just about all in.
Cora's nothing but a bag of bones, too. They'll never
winter--not on this range, they won't."

Cash got up and went to the doorway, looking out
over Bud's shoulder at the spiritless donkeys trailing
in to water. Beyond them the desert baked in its
rim of hot, treeless hills. Above them the sky glared
a brassy blue with never a cloud. Over a low ridge
came Monte and Pete, walking with heads drooping.
Their hip bones lifted above their ridged paunches,
their backbones, peaked sharp above, their withers
were lean and pinched looking. In August the
desert herbage has lost what little succulence it ever
possessed, and the gleanings are scarce worth the
walking after.

"They're pretty thin," Cash observed specula-
tively, as though he was measuring them mentally for
some particular need.

"We'd have to grain 'em heavy till we struck bet-

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