ches
thick."

"You'll cut that meat straight across, and give me my right share o'
lean, you puddin'-headed, sandhill crane," shouted Harry.

"Who're you a-calling names, you bow-legged little shrimp?" shouted Gid,
slapping Harry across the face with a piece of fat pork.

An angry mix-up, school boy rules, followed, to the great detriment
of the rations. Si and Shorty rushed up, separated the combatants, and
administered shakes, cuffs, and sharp reprimands.

"Now, you quarrelsome little whelps," said Si, after quiet had been
restored, "you've got to take them rations that you've spiled for
yourselves. You shan't have no other. Put that bread and that meat
you've kicked around into your own haversacks. Then go back there and
roll up your blankets--same as the other boys. Alf Russell, you and
Jim Humphreys come here and divide the rest o' these rations into seven
parts, if you kin do it without fightin'."

The division of the rations proceeded, with some jars between Russell
and Humphreys over the apportionment of fat and lean meat, and angry
protests from little Pete Skidmore because they made his share smaller
than anybody else's.

"Yit," said he, "I've got to march just as far as any of you, carry just
as big a gun, and do just as much shootin'."

"You're wrong," said the medical-minded Alf Russell. "You ought to have
less than the others, because you're smaller. The littler and younger
the person the smaller the dose, always."

"No," acceded the farmer Jim Humphreys. "Tain't natural, nor right. You
don't give a colt as much feed as you do a grown horse. Anybody knows
that."

"Pete's plea is sound," contraverted the legal-minded Monty Scruggs. "All
men are equal before the law, though they mayn't be a foot high. Rations
are a matter of law, and the law's no respecter of persons."

"Rations is intended," persisted Alf, "to give a man what he needs to
eat--nothing more, nothing less. Pete don't need as much as a man; why
give it to him? There'd be just as much sense in giving him the clothes
for a six-footer."

"All o' you are always imposin' on me 'cause I'm little," whimpered
Pete. "And that stuck-up Alf Russell's the worst of all. Just because
he's goin' to be a doctor, and leads in singin' at church, he thinks
he knows more'n the man what writ the arithmetic, and he's down on me
because I won't take all he says for law and gospel, in spite of his
airs. Jim Humphreys is down on me, because I writ home th