“O, Gus, I don’t know what I should do if you were not here with me!” exclaimed Ned, who was the first to speak.
“Don’t you, indeed!” replied his companion. “Have you forgotten how squarely you went back on me no longer ago than last night? You just as good as told me that you had seen enough of me. You could get along without me well enough while you had your cousin to lean on, but now that he is gone, I am a bully boy again. No, sir; you can’t throw me away and pick me up again when you please, now I tell you!”
“O, don’t talk that way!” whined Ned, who knew that he was powerless, and that everything depended upon Gus. “I didn’t mean it. I was frightened out of my senses, and didn’t know what I was saying.”
“No, you were not frightened. You had got all over it and were laughing about the ‘lark’ you had had. You said it, whether you meant it or not, and I shall take you at your word.”
“You are not going to leave me?” Ned almost gasped.
“Yes, I am. When we reach Brownsville, if we ever do, you will see the last of me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind yet. I know what I am going to do now: I am going to sleep.”
Ned could not understand how Gus could take the matter so coolly. He was slumbering heavily in less than five minutes after he arranged his blankets, while Ned, whose excitement would not permit him to sleep, tossed uneasily about, thinking over the incidents of the last few hours, and trembling when he looked forward to the long journey before him and its possible ending.
“I am not out of danger yet,” he kept saying to himself, “for if I were, George would not have traded clothes with me. He has been pretty good to me, I must say. It isn’t every fellow who would stand by a cousin as he has stood by me, and I almost wish I had treated him a little better. Perhaps I shall never see him again. Well, if I don’t——”