Abe had stuck his needle down into the log beside him. Near, were the buttons he had fished out of his pocket, and he was laboring with clumsy fingers and rising temper at an obdurate bunch of thread.
“I've been round looking over the field,” said Kent, as he came up.
A contemptuous snort answered him.
“You ought to've been along. I saw a great many interesting things.”
“O, yes, I s'pose. Awful interesting. Lot o' dead men laying around in the mud. 'Bout as interesting, I should say, as a spell o' setting on a Coroner's jury. The things you find interesting would bore anybody else to death.”
Abe gave the obstinate clump a savage twist which only made its knots more rebellious, and he looked as if strongly tempted to throw it into the fire.
“Don't do it, Abe,” said Kent, with a laugh that irritated Abe worse still. “Thread's thread, out here, a hundred miles from nowhere. You don't know where you'll get any more. Save it—my dear fellow—save it. Perchance you may yet sweetly beguile many an hour of your elegant leisure in unraveling its fantastic convolutions with your taper fingers, and——”
“Lord! Lord!” said Abe with an expression of deep weariness, but without looking in Kent's direction, “Who's pulled the string o' that clack-mill and set it going? When it gets started once it rolls out big words like punkins dropping out o' the tail of a wagon going up hill. And there's no way o' stopping it, either. You've just got to wiat till it runs down.”
“The Proverbs say so fittingly that 'A fool delighteth not in wise instruction,'” said Kent, as he stepped around to the other side of the fire. His foot fell upon a projecting twig, the other end of which flew up and landed a very hot coal on the back of Abe's hand. Abe's action followed that of the twig, in teh suddenness of his upspringing. He hurled an oath and a firebrand at his comrade.
“This is really becoming domestic,” said Kent as he laughingly dodged. “The gentle amenities could not cluster more thickly around our fireside, even if we were married.”