“It’s darn little I know about any car but a Ford,” Casey admitted plaintively.  “When yuh come to them complicated ones that you can crawl behind the wheel and set your boot on a button and holler giddap and she’ll start off in a lope, I don’t know about it.  A Ford’s like a mule or a burro.  You take a monkey wrench and work ’em over, and cuss, and that’s about all there is to it.  But you take them others, and I got to admit I don’t know.”

“Well,” said Bill, and spat reflectively, “you roll up your sleeves and I’ll learn yuh.  It’ll take time for the stuff to be delivered, and you can learn a lot in two or three weeks, Casey, if you fergit that prospectin’ idea and put your mind to it.”

Casey rolled a cigarette and smoked half of it, his eyes clinging pensively to the barren hills behind Lund.  He hunched his shoulders, looked at Bill and grinned reluctantly.

“She’s a go with me, Bill, if you can’t think of no other way to spend money.  I wisht you took to poker more, or minin’, or something that’s got action.  Stakin’ Casey Ryan to a garage business looks kinda foolish to me.  But if you can stand it, Bill, I can.  It’s kinda hard on the tourists, don’t yuh think?”

Thus are garages born,—­too many of them, as suffering drivers will testify.  Casey Ryan, known wherever men of the open travel and spin their yarns, famous for his recklessly efficient driving of lurching stagecoaches in the old days, and for his soft heart and his happy-go-lucky ways; famous too as the man who invented ungodly predicaments from which he could extricate himself and be pleased if he kept his shirt on his back; Casey Ryan as the owner of a garage might justly be considered a joke pushed to the very limit of plausibility.  Yet Casey Ryan became just that after two weeks of cramming on mechanics and the compiling of a reference book which would have made a fortune for himself and Bill if they had thought to publish it.

“A quort of oil becomes lubrecant and is worth from five to fifteen cents more per quort when you put it into a two-thousand dollar car or over,” was one valuable bit of information supplied by Bill.  Also:  “Never cuss or fight a man getting work done in your place.  Shut up and charge him according to the way he acts.”

It is safe to assume that Bill would make a fortune in the garage business anywhere, given normal traffic.

Patmos consists of a water tank on the railroad, a siding where trains can pass each other, a ten-by-ten depot, telegraph office and express and freight office, six sweltering families, one sunbaked lodging place with tent bedrooms so hot that even the soap melts, and the Casey Ryan garage.  I forgot to mention three trees which stand beside the water tank and try to grow enough at night to make up for the blistering they get during the day.  The highway (Coast to Coast and signed at every crossroads in red letters on white metal boards with red arrows pointing to the far skyline) shies away from the railroad at Patmos so that perspiring travelers look wistfully across two hundred yards or so of lava rock and sand and wish that they might lie under those three trees and cool off.  They couldn’t, you know.  It is no cooler under the trees than elsewhere.  It merely looks cooler.