“Not one man in a million knows what a stream of water can do, and he was one of the million that didn’t. So he r’ared up and said he would splash the water over me, and he raised his ax. I had half a mind to turn the lever and squirt him over the neighboring bluff, but I had pity in my soul, so I hollers, ‘Don’t!’
“But them words was too late. He is one of the very few men who will ever tell anybody how he tried cutting a hydraulic stream in two. While he was blasting me he wandered about, sitting on his horse loose; the ax came down. I was looking right plumb at him, but just how, when and in what way he disappeared I will never tell you.
“I followed the direction of the stream until I found him. He was curled up on his back, about half the ax handle in his hand. Soon as I came in sight he hollered, ‘Whoa!’ I stared at him. I come a little nearer, and he yelled ‘Whoa!’ again, and tried to scramble to his feet. I learned afterward that he’d been a mule-skinner for a while and thought his team had turned on him.
“I grabbed him by the neck. ‘Now, you horny-headed son of toil,’ I said to him, ‘you’ve learned one thing to-day. Keep on doing that for three thousand, six hundred and seventy-five days in the year and by the end of that time you won’t put your thumb on the buzz-saw.’
“‘You don’t mean to tell me a stream of water done that!’ he gasps out.
“‘You have three shies at it,’ I said. ‘I’ll furnish the axes, and every time that stream doesn’t knock you one hundred and fifty feet you get a new cigar. Want to buy in the game?’ I shambled him off to his wagon and dumped him in.
“He laid low for his revenge, like the darned farmer he was, and meanwhile Hohankton was the cause of our undoing. Animals have a heap more sense about natural things than men has. Hank got in the way of following the boys over to the side of the creek. You know I used to undercut the bank while the boys worked the big stone out for me and loosened up the dirt here and there. They was as careless fellows as you’d see. Yet, at the same time, no man wants an eighty-foot bank of dirt on top of him, and so they’d be quite anxious in their minds for about five minutes before the slide came.
“The first day Hank went over there he threw up his head as though he smelled something, straightened his tail, grunted loud and away he went. The boys near got pinched looking at him and laughing. When they went back, Hank went back, and the next time he blew his signal everybody departed. We were not such a swell-headed crowd we couldn’t learn a thing from an animal. Hank, old boy Rocks, was just as right as he was before, and after that he took up his position as Official Notifier and he never went wrong. The boys could work right along till they heard that squeal, and then do fast time to the creek.
“We was proud enough of Hanky before, but now he had this actual stunt of his that we could prove to any or all lookers-on, our chests stuck out till the buttons popped off. Other fellows would drop in with stories of dogs that had done all the wonderful things that you have heard tell of, and cats that used to milk cows, and horses that could figure up to six times six, and all them lovely relations that gets to be natural history around the camps, and we could stand for it and say ‘Yes,’ just as if we believed it.
“Then we’d remark we had a pig in camp; and wouldn’t say anything more until Hank signaled, and the visitor would begin to open his mouth to see everybody a-running, asking why. Then down come the bank!