"Serve 'em right!"
A heavy sigh from the Colonel. "Yes, but we'll have to dig 'em out!"
"Look here, Colonel"—the Boy spoke with touching solemnity—"not before breakfast!"
"Right you are!" laughed the Colonel; and they went in.
It was that day, after the others had been released and fed, that the Boy fell out with Potts concerning who had lost the hatchet—and they came to blows. A black eye and a bloody nose might not seem an illuminating contribution to the question, but no more was said about the hatchet after the Colonel had dragged the Boy off the prostrate form of his adversary.
But the Colonel himself lost his temper two days later when O'Flynn broached the seal set months before on the nearly empty demijohn. For those famous "temperance punches" the Colonel had drawn on his own small stock. He saw his blunder when O'Flynn, possessing himself of the demijohn, roared out:
"It's my whisky, I tell you! I bought it and paid furr it, and but for me it would be at the bottom o' the Yukon now."
"Yes, and you'd be at the bottom of the Yukon yourself if you hadn't been dragged out by the scruff o' your neck. And you'd be in a pretty fix now, if we left you alone with your whisky, which is about all you've got."
"We agreed," Potts chipped in, "that it should be kept for medicinal purposes only."
Sullenly O'Flynn sipped at his grog. Potts had "hogged most of the hootch."