stood around chewin' gum and rollin' her lamps at the
head guy. Then the movin'-picture express, which was a retired
switch-engine hooked onto a Swede observation car, backs down on
Adolphus, and we was to rush up like--pretty fast, and save his life.

"She was a sassy little chicken with blond feathers and a three-quarter
rig skirt. She had a regular strawberry-ice-cream-soda complexion, and
her eyes looked like a couple of glass alleys with electric lights in
'em. I wondered if she took 'em out at night to go to sleep or only
switched off the current. Anyhow, up she rides in a big reddish kind of
automobile and twists her hands round her wrists and looks up the track
and down the track and sees us and says, 'Oh, w'ich way has he went?
W'ich way did Disgustus Adolphus beat it to?' And chewin' gum right on
top of that, too. It was tough on us, Miss, but we needed the money.

"'Bout the eighteenth time she comes coughin' up in that old one-lung
machine,--to get her expression right, so the boss kept hollerin',--why,
I gets sick and tired. If there's anything _doin_', why, I'm game, but
such monkeyin'! There was that picture-machine idiot workin' the crank
as if he was shellin' a thicket-full of Injuns with a Gatling, and his
fool cap turned round with the lid down the back of his neck, and me and
Collie, the only sensible-actin' ones of the lot, because we was actin'
natural, jest restin'. I got sick and tired. The next time up coughs
that crippled-up automobile with the mumps on its front tire, and she
says, 'Where, oh, where has he went?' I ups and says, 'Crazy, Miss, and
can you blame him?'

"She didn't see no joke in that, so the boss he fired us. He wasn't
goin' to pay us at that, but I picks up the little picture-machine box
and I swings her up over the track kind of suggestive like. 'One!' said
I. 'Do we get our money?'

"'Drop that machine!' says he, rushin' up to me.

"'I'm a-goin' to,' says I, 'good and hard. Think again, while I count.
Do we get our money?'

"'You get pinched!' says he.

"'Two,' says I, and I swings the box up by the legs.

"'Hole on!' yells the boss. 'Pay the mutt, Jimmy, and, for Gord sake,
get that machine before he ruins the best reel we made yet!'

"We got paid."

"But the bell and Moonstone Canon?" questioned Louise, glancing back at
Boyar grazing down the meadow.

"Sure! Well, we flopped near here that night--"

"Flopped?"

"Uhuh. Let's see, you ain't hep to that, are yo