"Is that tight enough?" said he.
"That'll do," said I.
"Because," said he, "I can easy tighten it more yet."
"No," said I, "that'll do."
"Well, of course, if that'll do," he conceded; and then, not finishing his sentence, he chattered on. "Only, I don't want to be like ol' Sam Cook. He was 'long o' we chaps at work for Putticks when they was a-buildin' Coswell Church. I was there scaffoldin', an' this here Cook was s'posed to be helpin' of us. But we see as he never pulled, an' so one day we got two ropes and fastened the ends of 'em with jest black cotton. We made it look all like a knot, and he never see what we was up to. An' when it come to pullin', there was he makin' out to be pullin', leanin' back with his arms stretched out a-gruntin' 'Ugh!... Ugh!' and all the time never pullin' a pound. Why, if he'd on'y pulled half a dozen pounds, he'd ha' broke that cotton; but it never broke. Mr. John Puttick hisself was there, and he says, 'Well, I never see the like o' that in all my time! Why,' he says, 'you wouldn't pull enough to pull a sausage asunder,' he says. Ye see, he (Cook) always went by the name o' Sausage, 'cause his wife used to make sausages, so Mr. Puttick says to 'n, 'Why, you wouldn't pull a sausage asunder!' he says."
Too soon, unlooked-for difficulties presented themselves in our wire-straining. We began to agree that we hardly felt as if we had been apprenticed to the work, and Bettesworth muttered,
"I dunno as I should care much about goin' out to take a job puttin' up wire."
To get the first wire tightly fixed between two posts was easy enough, but, to our dismay, the tightening of a second wire invariably slackened the first. Bettesworth was jubilating over his second wire.
"There, he's tight, an' no mistake!"
"Ah, but look at the first one!"