"Jim and Rex ought both to go with you, Tug; and you must take along the lantern, and these extra corn cakes I have baked, and some bacon—"
"The bacon's raw," Jim protested.
"Well, stupid, you could fry it over some coals on the end of a stick, couldn't you?" exclaimed Tug, impatiently. He was getting very tired of Jim's constant objections.
"And you must take this little bit of brandy, because you know, he might—might be—"
"Now, Katy, dear Katy," said Tug, his own eyes moist, as he threw his arm around the shoulders of the girl, who had broken down at last, and was crying bitterly. "Don't cry, Katy. If you give in, what are we goin' to do? You are the life of the party, and there ain't nothin' we wouldn't any of us—and specially me—do for you. Really now, Katy—Here, you young cub, what are you bellerin' about? If I catch you crying round here again, discouragin' your sister in this style, I'll thrash you well!"
"DON'T CRY, KATY!"
Tug was thoroughly excited and distressed by this last and heaviest trouble, and most anxious of all to make the rest believe he wasn't anxious. As usual, when excited, he dropped into the slang he had been striving to forget. But this added force to his speeches, for when it occurred everybody understood that he was very much in earnest.
"I knew a young fellow," Tug himself used to say, when laughed at for this peculiarity, "whose father was a Dutchman, but who could never be persuaded to learn that language. 'Why not?' we used to ask him. 'Well, fellows,' he would say, 'my daddy talks English till he catches me up to some mischief; then he begins to talk Dutch, and goes for his whip; so I've got a terrible distaste for Dutch.' It's with me as it was with that man. When I am mad, or mean business, I'm pretty likely to talk in the 'Dutch' I learned when I was a boy."