"Good, good," says Aggy, his honest face gleamin' with joy. "Let's all eat now and swop maps afterward."
Things kind of stopped for a minute. If a man was unhitchin' a mule, he waited till you could count 1, 2, 3, and then continnered.
"What d'ye mean by 'map'?" says one lad, bent under a horse to hide his face.
"What do I mean?" says Ag, offended. "Why, I mean just what Noah Webster meant when the dove came back bringin' the definition to his ark. I mean map—m-a-p, map—a drawin' that shows you the way to get to a red cross that doesn't exist on the face of nature. I like green crosses as a matter of taste, but all our paralysed friend had left was a red one, so I took that, not to be unsociable."
I've been at pleasanter lookin' picnics.
Finally the feller under the horse did some deep thinkin' and come out. "Have you honest got a map?" says he.
"To the Lost Injun mine? 'Heigh-o, the Lost Injun!'" sings Aggy. "Here she is, my friend, with all dips, angles, and variations; one million feet on the main lode; his heirs, assigns, orphans. E pluribus unum, forever and forever!"
"Yours ain't just the same as mine," says the feller, grimly spittin'.
"No," says Ag, "I reckon he spread it around. He didn't know this was the nearest ford on Squaw Creek, and we might likely come together."
And then arose a cussin', not loud, but with a full head of steam—it would make ordinary loud seem like the insides of a whisper—and a rush for horses.