“He took care of the coats and the lunch-boxes. If a stranger came around he’d show his tusk with his lip all curled up, and growl something ferocious. He was a right smart animal. I can see him now, going the lengths of Main Street, sounding like a busted clarinet player telling his woes in music, to let you know he was there, and that if there was a doughnut or some apple-sass, or, in fact, almost anything that a hog might like, you could please your friend Hohankton by putting it forth.
“But nothing in the world would get him fat. He was built like a fish, fore and aft, and in a straightaway I think he could hold a jack-rabbit.
“The Judge, he was a heavy-built old man who wore his chin on his breast most of the time. When Hank walked alongside of him he hunched up his back like the Judge, and put on much the same expression, until the Judge rumbled out, ‘Durn that hawg!’ and give him a scratch on the back with his cane.
“Then, if there was a lively bunch, why, Hank was merry, too. He would trot and amble with one side, and gallop with the other, make prancing steps, biting at his own tail till an oyster’d laugh.
“We had miles of claims on the bank. The pay was light, howsomever, and you had to send about twenty acres down the stream to get enough to pay the hands off. We had plenty of water on a two-hundred-foot fall, or it wouldn’t have paid for the trouble.
“Howsomever, we sent an almighty lot of farm land down where the ranchers didn’t want it. They objected to our covering their vegetables with four solid foot of tailings, consequently they kicked like anything, but it was just mine job against vegetable job, and after the law courts had been worn out and decided:
The rose is red, the sky is blue;
We don’t know nothing, no more’n you,
and everybody had an injunction out against somebody else, which he couldn’t enforce, why it came back to our old friend, physical trouble, again. The farmers outnumbered us, but we ranked in the first class for physical trouble, so there hadn’t been anything but an exchange of personal remarks.
“There was just one rancher, who grew too fast when he was young, and then stopped too quick after he grew up, came at us fierce. He called us all kinds of twisted crooks and straight-out thieves he could think of. He had it in for me particular. Once, as he got to putting it on me, he grew excited, and began to swing an ax around. He came nigh hitting the stream one or two passes, and I told him:
“‘You jay bird, you’ll be a-sitting and a-singing on a limb if you monkey with that little squirt of water. You are perfectly safe from me during working-hours, but don’t fool with our piping lay.’