"How was that?"
"I can't never tell you exactly how it was, but somehow I had got my foot wedged in the root of a tree, and I had been tryin' an hour to git it out, without success. The tree was hard, and I was just tacklin' that root with my knife—I'd have cut through it in about an hour, I reckon—when 'long comes that feller Handsome that I had saved from the hole in the rocks. He had an axe on his shoulder, and when he spied me he stopped, and laughed, and laughed until I got mad.
"'Caught in yer own trap, ain't ye?' he axed me.
"'I be,' says I. 'You've got a axe, and mebby you kin help me out o' it.'
"Well, he did. He chopped the root in a jiffy, and I was free; but, bless you, I could 'a' done it myself with my knife in a hour, anyhow. All the same, I was grateful to him, and we sot down on a log and chinned for a while."
"What about?"
"He asked me what I was doing around there, and I told him that I was thinking of looking over the swamp below the tracks a leetle, with some idea of settin' traps there late this fall and winter, and he said as how he wouldn't advise me to do it. He said as how I wouldn't be likely to ketch the sort of animals I was after, and that some of the animals might ketch me; and, as I ain't exactly a fule, I ketched onto what he meant, and I ain't been nigh that place since. And then it turned out afterward as I thought it would, them hoboes had a hidin' place in that very swamp."
"Right you are, Bill!" said Nick, laughing. "Is that all the conversation you had with Handsome?"
"Every bit of it."
"And you have never seen him since?"