“Do you want to be whipped with a whip?” he demanded.
“Naw, I don’t want to be whipped with a whip,” sez Badger-face.
“Then you stop swearin’,” sez Olaf. “We been to enough trouble about you, and I don’t intend to have my wife listen to any more o’ your swearin’. If you don’t stop it, I whip all your skin off. You say you want to die—I whip you to death before your very eyes.”
Badger heaved at his ropes a time or two, an’ then he realized his weakness, sank back on the bed, an’ the tears rolled down his cheeks. He fair sobbed. “You’re a set o’ cowards,” he yelled, “the whole pack o’ you! You wouldn’t let me die, and now you threaten to whip me to death. I dare any one of ya to shoot me—you yellow-hearted cowards!”
“I care not for what you say I am,” said Olaf. “You know if I am a coward, and you know if I keep my word. I say to you, slow an’ careful, that if you yell swear words again in my house, I whip your hide off.”
Well, this had a quietin’ influence on Badger’s conversation; but he fretted himself a good deal as to what we intended to do with him. Finally one day when he began to look a little more like a live man than a skeleton, Horace sez to him: “Badger, you said you didn’t have any friends, an’ it must be true, ’cause not one of your own outfit has ever been to see you, not even Ty Jones.”
“Ty Jones don’t stay out here through the winter,” sez Badger-face. “If he’d been here, he’d have squared things up for this, one way or another.”
“Where does he go?” asked Horace.
“I don’t know,” sez Badger-face.
Horace asked Olaf about it, and Olaf said ’at Ty Jones allus pulled out in December, an’ didn’t come back until March.