“So you’re goin’?”

“Of course, you know I must.  I started with an outfit and fifteen hundred dollars, now I haven’t a cent.”

The Kentuckian raised his heavy eyes to the jam-jar.  “Oh, help yourself.”

The Boy laughed, and shook his head.

“I wish you wouldn’t go,” the other said very low.

“You see, I’ve got to.  Why, Nig and I owe you for a week’s grub already.”

Then the Colonel stood up and swore—­swore till he was scarlet and shaking with excitement.

“If the life up here has brought us to ‘Scowl’ Austin’s point of view, we are poorly off.”  And he spoke of the way men lived in his part of Kentucky, where the old fashion of keeping open house survived.  And didn’t he know it was the same thing in Florida?  “Wouldn’t you do as much for me?”

“Yes, only I can’t—­and—­I’m restless.  The summer’s half gone.  Up here that means the whole year’s half gone.”

The Colonel had stumbled back into his seat, and now across the deal table he put out his hand.

“Don’t go, Boy.  I don’t know how I’d get on without——­” He stopped, and his big hand was raised as if to brush away some cloud between him and his pardner.  “If you go, you won’t come back.”

“Oh, yes, I will.  You’ll see.”

“I know the kind,” the other went on, as if there had been no interruption.  “They never come back.  I don’t know as I ever cared quite as much for my brother—­little fella that died, you know.”  Then, seeing that his companion did not instantly iterate his determination to go, “That’s right,” he said, getting up suddenly, and leaving his breakfast barely touched.  “We’ve been through such a lot together, let’s see it out.”

Without waiting for an answer, he went off to his favourite seat under the little birch-tree.  But the incident had left him nervous.  He would come up from his work almost on the run, and if he failed to find his pardner in the tent there was the devil to pay.  The Boy would laugh to himself to think what a lot he seemed able to stand from the Colonel; and then he would grow grave, remembering what he had to make up for.  Still, his sense of obligation did not extend to giving up this splendid chance down on Indian River.  On Wednesday, when the fellow over at the Buckeyes’ was for going back, the Boy would go along.

On Sunday morning he ran a crooked, rusty nail into his foot.  Clumsily extracted, it left an ugly wound.  Walking became a torture, and the pain a banisher of sleep.  It was during the next few days that he found out how much the Colonel lay awake.  Who could sleep in this blazing sun?  Black tents were not invented then, so they lay awake and talked of many things.