“Ain’t that shome finish?”
“Grewshome ghoul,” shudders Telescope.
“It’s a fac’,” argues Chuck. “Bet anybody forty dollars she never made the turn out of Sillman Gulch. Betcha she turned over there. Ain’t nobody got any shporting blood? Even money that she didn’t make that turn—thirty to forty that they hung up before they got that far. Any takers? Bet ten ’gainst forty that—that Solomon has killed Wick Smith before thish.”
“Now you’re getting into pleasant conversation,” says Telescope. “That’s what I call looking at the doughnut instead of the hole.”
I don’t know where we went. We took turns carrying that demijohn. We wanted something to pour between unresisting lips, like you read about, but we can’t seem to find no unresisting lips.
I know we all fell into Wind River, which is three miles from Paradise. Muley hung up on a sand-bar and sobbed himself to sleep. Telescope crawled back on the bank and implored us to go ahead and save the women and children and leave him to die like a man. I heard Chuck singing—
“Locked in a stable with a s-h-e-e-p,
I lay me dow-w-w-wn in hay to sle-e-e-e-ep.”
Me, I got tangled up in the limbs of a fallen tree and went to sleep with my feet over a limb.
“Well!” says a voice, and I woke up. There is “Ricky” Henderson setting on his bronc, looking at us. “What’s the matter with you fellers? I helped rope your broncs yesterday when they came back to town, and they’re tied to the rack in front of the Eureka—or were last night.”