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grinned, they said, “Now nothing to be scared of, honey. This ship’s just feeling frisky as a cutting horse.” The Texas-bred women looked unruffled and resigned like mothers who are accustomed to the antics of high-spirited children.
    From her aloof place near the tail of the big room the aquiline Lady Karfrey barked, “Why don’t you Texans grow up!”
    Bick Benedict’s brother Bowie and Bick’s sister Maudie Placer from Buffalo turned upon her the gaze which native Texans usually reserve for rattlesnakes.
    The ship righted itself, Leslie’s lovely voice projected itself miraculously above the roar and the chatter. She pointed toward the windows and the plains below. “They’re using the stinger on the mesquite. You might like to see it—those of you who aren’t Texans.”
    “Stinger? What is a stinger?” the South American asked. Obedient faces were pressed against the windows, they surveyed a toy world.
    “It’s that yellow speck. Now we’re a bit lower, you can see. The black patch is brush. The little thing moving along is the stinger, it’s a kind of tank with great knives and arms and head like a steel monster. It’s called a tree dozer too. It’s rather fascinating to watch.”
    Up there, high in the sky, they could see the green patch of brushland that was a wilderness of mesquite. The trees were large and the thickness was dense and the yellow monster snorted and clanked and backed and attacked but they could not hear the snorts or sense the power. There was the green patch and then a path no longer green as the trees fell right and left like ninepins.
    The King turned a shocked face away from the window. “But why do you cut down a forest like that!”
    “That’s no forest,” Bick Benedict said. “That’s mesquite.”
    “But these are trees. Trees.”
    Leslie turned from the window, she began to explain, brightly. “You see, the whole country’s overrun with mesquite.”
    “Really! The whole of the United States!”
    Oh dear! Leslie thought. Now I’m talking that way too. “No, I meant only Texas. All this once was open prairie. Grazing country. Then the mesquite came in a little, it wasn’t bad because there were no trees to speak of, you know. Then they brought cattle in from Mexico where the mesquite was growing. Some say that the cattle droppings carried the seed. Others say that when they built all these thousands of miles of automobile roads they stopped the prairie fires that used to sweep the earth clean of everything but grass——”
    The voice of Maudie Placer, Bick’s perpetually angry sister, broke in with a sneering quality of almost comic dimensions. “Really, Leslie, you’re getting to be quite a rancher, aren’t you! You must have been reading books again.” But no one heeded this or even heard it except the three women who knew—Leslie herself, and her good friend Adarene Morey and the outspoken amiable Vashti Snyth.
    “But your serfs,” said the King. “The peons I see everywherehere. Could they not have removed this mesquite with hand labor before it grew to such——”
    “Serfs!” roared Bale Clinch. “Why, we got no serfs here in this country! Everybody here is a free American.”
    “Yes, of course,” agreed the King hastily. “Certainly. I see. I see.”
    He does see, Leslie thought. He’s only a frightened little king without a kingdom but he sees.
    “Lunch!” cried Vashti happily as the steward and the stewardess and the assistant steward appeared, quite a little procession, with trays. “Mm! Leslie, you do have the loveliest food! Nobody in Texas has food like Leslie’s. Avocados stuffed with crab meat to begin with! My!”
    It was midafternoon as they came down at the Hermoso airport, the shabby old municipal airport. As they buckled their seat belts for the landing their faces were pressed against the windows, they beheld glittering beside the scrofulous old airport the splendid white and silver palace which Jett Rink had flung