Jack,
good-natured as he was, partly grasped these facts as he found himself
taken from the pannier, but when it came to getting cranky little Jill
out of the basket and into a collar, there ensued a scene so
unpleasant that no collar was needed. The ranchman wore his hand in a
sling for two weeks, and Jacky at his chain's end paced the ranch-yard
alone.
V. THE RIVER HELD IN THE FOOTHILLS
There was little of pleasant interest in the next eighteen months of
Jack's career. His share of the globe was a twenty-foot circle around
a pole in the yard. The blue hills of the offing, the nearer pine
grove, and even the ranch-house itself were fixed stars, far away and
sending merely faint suggestions of their splendors to his not very
bright eyes. Even the horses and men were outside his little sphere
and related to him about as much as comets are to the earth. The very
tricks that had made him valued were being forgotten as Jack grew up
in chains.
At first a butter-firkin had made him an ample den, but he rapidly
passed through the various stages--butter-firkin, nail-keg,
flour-barrel, oil-barrel--and had now to be graded as a good average
hogshead Bear, though he was far from filling that big round wooden
cavern that formed his latest den.
The ranch hotel lay just where the foothills of the Sierras with their
groves of live oaks were sloping into the golden plains of the
Sacramento.
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