"The process was a very interesting one. At first they seemed to think it was flies, but when their kicking and switching proved ineffectual they gently moved forward just far enough to bring the wagon, half full of hay, over the fire. Then they resumed their slumbers.
"Well, I paused a moment, wondering whether I should let nature take its course and have grilled steak for supper, but I decided that I was in more need of steak on the hoof than in the platter. So I crowded in and unhitched them, and got my eye-brows singed for my pains."
"Good boy, Spoof!" said I. "You couldn't have done more than that." Whereupon Spoof turned on me a look of gratitude out of all proportion to my remark.
"It's good of you to say that. I felt that I had been rather an ass, don't you know? I was quite sure you would see the smoke. . . . Well,—I say, let's go in and have some tea."
So we had tea, with bread and jam, and afterwards Spoof insisted upon reading paragraphs from Punch.
"It's a different kind of humor, don't you know?" he would say, when we failed to laugh at the right moment; "nothing to do with buffalo bones or tiger lilies, or gophers tied by their hind legs to the corner stakes of one's farm. But then, we English are a peculiar people; we can have a joke without making a bonfire over it."
"That is just what you, personally, didn't do," Jack reminded him. "It was your bonfire, not ours."
It was almost sundown when Spoof for the seventh time absolved us from all blame in the matter, and we started on our trek homeward across the green prairie. Jack offered to go to town the next day and negotiate a deal for a new wagon, but Spoof would not hear of it. He himself would go, and no other.
"I have to pick up some new language, anyway," he insisted. "The bullocks are growing very tired of the monotony of my remarks."
Spoof evidently left the next morning, for when Jack and I went over to Two about the middle of the forenoon the place was deserted. We set to work in his hay field, and by Wednesday night we had harvested more hay than Spoof would have put up in a week. That was our atonement.