We spent no more time at breakfast than was necessary for eating and for roughly sketching out the plans for the day's work. After this each set about his task. I drove the sheep a short distance away toward the farther end of the valley, where they could conveniently get at the water and yet find rich pasturage; John and Zeba picketed out the mules; and father with the three negroes rounded up the cattle. THE COOK SHANTY This done, we set about making a shanty by digging to the depth of two or three feet a space about three yards wide and four yards long, around the sides of which we set branches of pecan trees. We planted poles at the four corners so that we could use the wagon covers for walls and roof. When this rudest kind of rude building was so far finished that it would screen us from the wind, we set up the cookstove, and mother began what in Bolivar County she would have called her regular Saturday's baking. After this we put on a roof of canvas, pinning the whole down as best we might with mesquite bushes, until we had a shed which would serve, but which was most crude looking. Although there was nothing on which we could pride ourselves in this first building, it had occupied us nearly the entire day, and I had no more than an hour in which to rest my weary limbs before it was necessary to stand guard over the sheep, lest the wolves carry off the beginnings of my flock. It was during this night, when it cost not only great effort, but real pain, to keep continually on the move lest I fall asleep, that I decided that at the very first opportunity I would build a corral. While our flock was so small, it would not be a very great task to build a pen sufficiently large to hold the animals together, and at the same time shut out the wolves. There were enough mesquite bushes, or trees, to provide me with the necessary material, and I decided upon the place where I would build a pen, figuring in my mind how the work could be best done. [Illustration] Therefore, when father relieved me at midnight, I had in my mind's eye the first sheep pen put up on the West Fork of the Trinity, and already in imagination was on the high road to prosperity. A STORM OF RAIN When another morning came, my dreams of what the future might bring me had become decidedly cloudy, for the rain was falling, not furiously, as in the case of a norther or a short-lived tempest, but with a steady downfall which told of a long spell of disagreeable weather, and I was not the only member of our party to come out from the beds in the wagons looking disheartened, and uncomfortably damp. [Illustration]