There was only one cheering thing about that whole sodden field of desolation--millions on millions of mosquitos had been battered to death by the hail. Great masses of them, literally pulped, had been strained out of the water and collected against heaps of débris in the ditches. One could scoop them up by the double handfuls. How often had I bemoaned the fact that every mosquito around some swampy Alaskan or Guinanan camp of mine had not a single head so that I could sever it with one fell swoop of and ax or _machete_! That was too much to hope for, of course; but right here was a tolerably fair approach to it. I squeezed three or four fistfuls of those pulped tormentors through my fingers and felt appreciably less depressed. Cut off by a deep-scoured drainage canal from a direct approach to the farm of the big red barn, I fared back for a quarter of a mile to a road and a bridge. Crossing the latter and wading through deep puddles, I came upon what I first took to be a deserted ranch. The corrals were down, the barn partially unroofed, and the windowless house was all but stripped of its shingles. There was a response to my knock, however, and I entered a half-wrecked kitchen to find three men sitting round a table. A lamp was burning on a wall-shelf, but its flickering flame barely threw a glow above the top of the opaquely smoked chimney. The greeting I received was unconventional--even slightly disconcerting. "Are you broke?" boomed the blunt query from a big chap with a hammer, evidently just through tacking a blanket over a window. His two companions took pipes from their mouths and hung on my answer as though it might be a matter of considerable importance. "Not at all...." I began, intending to go on and assure them that, far from being the hobo I looked, I had money in my pocket and a large bag of California home-dried apricots to give away. But they waited only on my denial. "All right. Move on!" they chorused to the accompaniment of stagy gestures. "This is no place for a man that ain't broke. We _are_. Went broke half an hour ago. _Hailed out!_" An old fellow with whiskers added the explanatory trimmings. I gulped two or three times and was about to frame a minimum demand for an hour to dry my wet togs by the fire when the big chap strode over, clapped me jovially on the shoulder and forced me into a chair by the table. "Don't mind our little joke, friend," he said with a ringing laugh. "Whatever there is left in this shack in the way of comfort is at your disposal for the night, or as long as you want to stay. Where did the storm catch you? Car stalled on the road, I suppose." "Boat--on river--sand-bar," I replied between gulps from the mug of steaming black coffee the big fellow had poured me.