"Go to the devil," said Shorty, making another slash at the roof with the ax.
"This is our car, I tell you," reiterated the men. "You let it alone, or we'll make you." Some of the men looked around for something to throw at them.
Si walked to the end of the car, tore off the brake-wheel, and came back.
"You fellers down there shut up and go back in side to your cards, if you know what's good for you," he said. "You're nothing but a lot of durned skulkers. We are here under orders. We don't want nothin' but a piece o' the tin roof. You kin have the rest. If any of you attempts to throw anything I'll mash him into the ground with this wheel. Do you hear me? Go back inside, or we'll arrest the whole lot of you and take you back to your regiments."
Si's authoritative tone, and the red stripes on his arm, were too much for the guilty consciences of the skulkers, and they went back inside the car. The tearing off the roof proceeded without further interruption, but with considerable mangling of their hands by the edges of the tin.
After they had gotten it off, they proceeded to roll it up and started back for their "house." It was a fearful load, and one that they would not have attempted to carry in ordinary times. But their blood was up; they were determined to outshine everybody else with their tin roof, and they toiled on over the mud and rough ground, although every little while one of them would make a misstep and both would fall, and the heavy weight would seem to mash them into the ground.
"I don't wonder old Jake Wilson was proud of his tin roof," gasped Si, as he pulled himself out of a mudhole and rolled the tin off him and Shorty. "If I'd a tin roof on my barn durned if my daughter should walk home with a man that didn't own a whole section of bottom land and drove o' mules to boot."
It was fully midnight before they reached their pen and laid their burden down. They were too tired to do anything more than lay their blankets down on a pile of cedar boughs and go to sleep.
The next morning they unrolled their booty and gloated over it. It would make a perfect roof, and they felt it repaid all their toils. Upon measurement they found it much larger each way than their log pen.
"Just right," said Shorty gleefully. "It'll stick out two feet all around. It's the aristocratic, fashion able thing now-a-days to have wide cornishes. Remember them swell houses we wuz lookin' at in Louisville? We're right in style with them."