Thayor broke out into a roar of laughter, and was about to ask the Clown whether the physic had killed the pneumonia or the woman, when the trapper slanting his shoulders against the bunk broke in with: 

“Ye ain’t laid it on a bit too thick, Freme.”  “I knowed Sam’s woman, and I knowed her mother ’fore she married Bill Eldridge over to Cedar Corners.”

“That’s whar she was from—­I seen her many a time.  My old shanty warn’t more ’n forty rod from where Morrison’s gang built the new one.”

Thayor’s delighted ears drank in every word.  The perfunctory discussion of a Board of Directors issuing a new mortgage was so many dull words compared with this human kind of speech.

“And now ye are here whar I kin get at ye, Billy,” continued the trapper, “let me tell ye how bad I feel when I think ye never been over to see me, or stopped even for a night.  Why it actually sets my blood a-bilin’—­makes me mad, as the feller said—­” Here he nodded toward Thayor—­“Some folks is that way, Mr. Thayor.”

“I’d like to have come,” pleaded Holcomb, “but somehow, Hite, I never managed to get over your way.  You see I live so far off now, and yet when I come to think of it, I must have passed close by it when I was gunning last fall over by Bear Pond.”

“Yes—­I knowed ye was gunnin’, and we cal’lated ye’d come in with them fellers what was workin’ for Joe Dubois.  Me and the old dog never give up lookin’ for ye.  The dog said he seen ye once, but you was too fur off to yell to.”

“I want to know!” exclaimed the Clown, as he re-crossed his long legs.

“Goll—­I felt sorry for the cuss; he took it so hard,” Hite went on.  “Then he owned up—­tellin’ me that when he see I felt so lonesome and disappointed at ye not comin’, he’d be daddinged if he could hold out any longer and see me so miserable; so he jest ris his ears and made believe you was a-comin’ and that he see ye, and that there warn’t time to let ye know.”

“Say—­don’t that beat all!” roared the Clown as he slapped his leg at the thought of the old dog’s sagacity.  Here the old dog cocked an ear and looked wistfully up into his master’s face.  Thayor could hardly believe the dog did not understand.

Hite paused in his narrative for breath.  When these men of the woods, living often for weeks and months with no fellow-being to talk to, loosen up they run on as unceasingly as a brook.

“But dang yer old hide, Billy, what I got most again’ ye is that ye ain’t writ afore,” and he slapped his young friend Holcomb vigorously on the back. “’Twarn’t a night that passed when I was to hum in the valley last winter, but what I’d kinder slink away from the store arter they’d sorted out what mail thar was, feelin’ ashamed, julluk the old dog does when he’s flambussled into a trout hole ahead of ye.  ‘Why, how you take it,’ my old woman would say; ’like as not Billy’s been so busy he hain’t had time to write ye and it hain’t come,’ says she.  ‘No,’ said I, ’if he’s writ I’d had it ’fore this.  United States mail don’t lie,’ says I.”