“Not before dark, and then we can shift our position.”
“Do you believe there is any hope at all for us in the way of getting out?”
The Irishman was careful not to arouse too strong hopes in the breast of the lad, and he tried to be guarded in his reply:
“An hour ago I would have sworn if there war a half-dozen of us in here, there was no show of our getting away wid our top-knots, for the raison that there is but one hole through which we could sneak, and there’s twenty of ’em sitting round there, and watching for us; but I faal that there is some ground for hope.”
“What reason for your saying there is hope? Isn’t it just as hard to get out the front without being seen?”
“It might be just now; but there’s no telling what them ither spalpeens mane to do arter the sun goes down. S’pose they get Lone Wolf and his men in such a big fight that they’d have their hands full, what’s to hinder our sneaking out the back-door during the rumpus, hunting up our mustangs, or somebody else’s, and resooming our journey to New Boston, which these spalpeens were so impertinent as to interrupt a short time since?”
Fred Munson felt that this was about as rose-colored a view as could be taken, and indeed a great deal rosier than the situation warranted—at least, in his opinion.
“Mickey, if that isn’t counting chickens before they’re hatched, I don’t know what is! While you’re supposing things, suppose these Indians don’t do all that, where’s going to come our chance of creeping out without their knowing it?”
Mickey scratched his head in his puzzled way, and replied:
“I’m sorry to obsarve that ye persist in axing knotty questions, as I reproved me landlord for doing in the ould country, when he found me digging praities in his patch. There’s a good many ways in which we may get a chance to craap out, and I’m bound to say there be a good many more by which we can’t; but the good Lord has been so good to us, that I can’t help belaving He won’t let us drop jist yet, though He may think that the best thing for us both will be to let the varmints come in and scalp us.”