Some of this waste had been the result of stupid ordering, while much of it grew from the system of yearly contracts, neither of which has changed unto this day. Smith furnishes wagons one year, by virtue of being the lowest bidder, and one must have Smith’s repair-parts. Next year Brown has the contract, again by virtue of being the lowest and therefore cheapest bidder; and part of Smith’s material is a dead loss to the Service. The method of checking stores was a grotesque science. Sewing-needles were counted, the unit being a single needle, whereas darning needles were accepted by the hundred. Anvils, log-chains, sledges, and mason-axes were known by weight, other tools by description; still other tools identified by sets. Each textbook, each library and reference volume,—and there were thousands,—was known by its more or less involved title, and so catalogued and counted and charged every three months. The technical names that came across Kansas with our forefathers had not changed. “Eveners” and “whiffle-trees” were recognized; but double and swingle-trees were taboo. And there were things that even the Westerners’ Bible could not define. Apparently no one ever wrote to Montgomery Ward for “crandalls” or “loop-sticks.” Sometimes Funk and Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary helped to an explanation, and at other times the Encyclopædia Britannica shed light down the ages to identify an article. It was like examining and listing the contents of Tutankhamen’s tomb, and we believed that the mummy of the original Indian Agent would be discovered in the depths of those cluttered warehouse-shrines. Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— quite so—there were shoes, men’s, women’s, misses’, boys’, youths’ and children’s, each divided into two sorts: Sunday and everyday; twelve classifications, and all counted and all charged. There were boxes of sealing-wax, and cobblers’ wax, and beeswax, in quantity; and in the attenuated garden, irrigated by the hand-bucket method, grew something resembling cabbages where free Congressional seeds had been planted. There were no ships of the keel variety; it was too dry—even the fish carried canteens; but there were burros, those pack-ships of the Desert, that cheerfully doubled as “Arizona nightingales.” And there was one official king, who, if he did not find that crandall the smith had made in 1893, would have months of explaining to those who did not know then, and do not know now, what a crandall is.