“Pie like mother made!” he muttered. “You patch-sewed bread-basket! Why, you fringy-panted walking delegate, I’ll agitate your system till your back teeth are chewin’ your own sweetbreads” He seized up a rope and began walking to where his horse was pasturing. “I could forgive him takin’ the money,” he continued. “He outplayed me. But—” Scipio was silent for a few yards, and then, “Pie like mother made!” he burst out again.
And now, reader, please rise with me in the air and look down like a bird at the trail of Spit-Kitten. The afternoon has grown late, and shadow is ascending among the thin pines by the Little Pasture. There goes Uncle Pasco, ambling easily along. He counts his money, and slaps his bad old leg with joy. With all those dollars he can render the next several months more than comfortable. Now he consults Scipio’s map, and here, sure enough, he comes to the fence, just as Scipio said he would come; that fence he was to follow for three miles, perhaps, or four. Uncle Pasco slaps his leg again, and gives a horrid, unconscientious cackle. And now he hangs Scipio’s pistol on a post of the fence and proceeds. While pleasing thoughts of San Francisco and champagne fill his mind as he rides, there comes Scipio along the trail after him at a nicely set interval. All is working with the agreeable precision of a clock. Scipio recovers his pistol, and after tying his horse out of sight a little way down the hill, he runs back and sits snug behind a tree close to the fence, waiting. He looks at his watch. “It took Japan and me twenty minutes to go around at a gallop,” he observes. “Uncle Pasco ain’t goin’ half that fast.” Scipio continues to wait with his six-shooter ready. In due time he pricks up his ears and rises upon his feet behind the tree. Next, he steps forth with his smile of an angel—but a fallen angel.
“Pie like mother made,” he remarks musically.
Why tell of Uncle Pasco’s cruel surprise? It is not known if he had gone round the fence more than once; but the town of Likely saw the dreadful condition of his clothes as he rode in that night. It was almost no clothes.
At that hour Scipio was finishing his letter to the foreman:—
“—this risponsibillity is shed,” had been the unwritten fragment of his sentence when it was cut short, and he now completed it, and went on:—
“Quite a little thing has took place just now about that money. Don’t jump for I am staying with it as you said to and I am liable to be staying with it as long as necessary but an old hobo held me up and got it off me and kept it for most three hours when I got it back off the old fool. I would not have throwed him around like I did if he had been content to lift the cash but he had to insult me too said I was pie and next time he’ll know a man should be civil no matter what his employment is.
“I have noticed another thing. To shoot strait always go to bed the same day you get up and to think strait use same pollicy.
“Your friend,
“Scipio Le Moyne.