"It's a pleasant man who keeps the corner cellar," says Ag, "but his whiskey has the flavour of old rags. Now my throat——"
"Don't say a word," says the deacon, drawin' a small half-gallon flask out of his clothes. "Do the snake-swallowin' act to your hearts' content, gentlemen, and remember there's just simply barrels more where that comes from. And now," says he, when the gurgling stopped, "let's go in and see the fun. Them's awful innocent, good-hearted folk, boys. I tell you straight, it works in through my leather to see 'em play."
We stepped where we could look at them; happy-faced mothers, giggling and happy little kids, and pretty girls—lots of 'em. And it lit through my hide, too.
"I s'pose you kin explain, Mr. Jones?" says the deacon, punchin' Ag in the ribs.
"Explain?" says Ag, proud. "Appoint me custodian of the bottle, and I hereby agree to explain anything: why brother Paris left us so completely, what became of Charley Ross, who struck Billy Patterson, where are the ships of Tyre, or any other problem the mind of man can conjure, from twice two to the handwriting on the wall."
"Forrud, march," says the deacon simply, and we j'ined them kind and gentle people under the Christmas tree.
A Touch of Nature
"These are odd United States," said Red. They certainly are. I'm thinking of a person I knew down in the Bill Williams Mountains, in Arizona. He was Scotch and his name was Colin Hiccup Grunt, as near as I could hear it. I never saw anything in Arizona nor any other place that resembled him in any particular.
We met by chance, the usual way, and the play come up like this: I'm going cross country, per short-cut a friend tells me about—this was when I was young; I could have got to where I was going in about four hours' riding, say I moved quick, by the regular route, but now I'm ten hours out of town, and all I know about where I am is that the heavens are above me and any quantity of earth beneath me. For the last two hours I've been losing bits of my disposition along the road, and now I'm looking for a dog to kick. Here we come to a green gulch with a chain of pools at the bottom of it.