wind for Uncle Emsley Telfair’s store at the Pimienta Crossing on the Nueces.
“About three in the afternoon I throwed my bridle rein over a mesquite limb and walked the last twenty yards into Uncle Emsley’s store. I got up on the counter and told Uncle Emsley that the signs pointed to the devastation of the fruit crop of the world. In a minute I had a bag of crackers and a long-handled spoon, with an open can each of apricots and pineapples and cherries and greengages beside of me with Uncle Emsley busy chopping away with the hatchet at the yellow clings. I was feeling like Adam before the apple stampede, and was digging my spurs into the side of the counter and working with my twenty-four-inch spoon when I happened to look out of the window into the yard of Uncle Emsley’s house, which was next to the store.
“There was a girl standing there—an imported girl with fixings on—philandering with a croquet maul and amusing herself by watching my style of encouraging the fruit canning industry.
“I slid off the counter and delivered up my shovel to Uncle Emsley.
“‘That’s my niece,’ says he; ‘Miss Willella Learight, down from Palestine on a visit. Do you want that I should make you acquainted?’
“‘The Holy Land,’ I says to myself, my thoughts milling some as I tried to run ’em into the corral. ‘Why not? There was sure angels in Pales———
