The fire was down in a little hollow. I skirted around it, but near enough so I could see who was camping there. It was two Japanese, one asleep, the other watching. I laughed inside. He wasn’t doing as good a job of watching as he thought he was. I could have plunked him with my slingshot, and I had half a mind to do it. But common sense came along just then and I made tracks away.
One thing was sure. The Japanese hadn’t left us. They were trying to bamboozle us into getting careless, just as Mark had said.
It got lighter and lighter as I went along, and after a while I came to the road. The first thing I did was to find a sheltered place where I could keep out of the breeze, watch the road, and be out of sight. Then I started in to wait.
Waiting is the meanest job in the world. I’d rather do ’most anything else than wait. You keep thinking every minute that what you’re waiting for will be along, and then when it don’t come you get impatient, and then you get irritable, and then you get mad, and after a long while you just sit there and chaw your knuckles and wish there was somebody to kick.
I’d got to the kicking stage when I heard something coming from away from town. A man was talking.
“Don’t yuh stop,” he says. “Keep on a-goin’. Jest shove one foot ahead and then foller it with another. If yuh stop agin I calc’late to most take the hide offn you. Whup! Wiggle your ears if you want to. G’wan, now.”
In a minute along came a mule with ears about a foot long. He was a humorous-looking mule, with a sort of twinkle in his eye. He was dragging a two-wheeled thing the like of which I’d never seen before, and in it was the disappointedest-looking man you ever saw. He wasn’t a big man, nor a little man. He was just an in-between man. Not only in size, but I guess in everything else. He was shabby, and his hat was battered, and he hadn’t shaved for about two weeks. My, but he looked mournful!
All the time he kept talking to his mule, begging him to keep on going and not to stop, till I stepped out in the road and said good morning.
The mule stopped and spread all four legs like he wasn’t willing to be pushed in any direction. He looked like something that somebody had braced up so the wind wouldn’t blow it down.
“Good mornin’?” says the man, making a question of it. “Good mornin’ nothin’. Look what you’ve up and done. You’ve stopped my automobeel. Dumbdest enjine in this here automobeel you ever seen.”