“I says to myself, ’Bud, it looks like you wouldn’t be forced to prospect for a living any more this season.  If that old sport turns himself loose you’re going to get ‘life’ three times and a holdover.’

“Next morning they tried every way to make me talk.  Once in a while the old man looked at me puzzled and searching, but I didn’t know him from a sweat-pad, and just paid strict attention to being dumb.

“It was mighty hard, too.  I got so nervous my mouth simply ached to let out a cayoodle.  The words kept trying to crawl through my sesophagus, and when I backed ’em up, they slid down and stood around in groups, hanging onto the straps, gradually filling me with witful gems of thought.

“The Colonel talked to me serious and quiet, like I had good ears, and says, ’My man, you can understand every word I say, I’m sure, and what your object is in maintaining this ridiculous silence, I don’t know.  You’re accused of a crime, and it looks serious for you.”

“Then he gazes at me queer and intent, and says, ’If you only knew how bad you are making your case you’d make a clean breast of it.  Come now, let’s get at the truth.’

“Them thought jewels and wads of repartee was piling up in me fast, like tailings from a ground-sluice, till I could feel myself getting bloated and pussy with langwidge, but I thought, ’No! to-morrow Kink ’ll be safe, and then I’ll throw a jolt into this man’s camp that’ll go down in history.  They’ll think some Chinaman’s been thawing out a box of giant powder when I let out my roar.’

“I goes to the guard-house again, with a soldier at my back.  Everything would have been all right if we hadn’t run into a mule team.

“They had been freighting from the railroad, and as we left the barracks we ran afoul of four outfits, three span to the wagon, with the loads piled on till the teams was all lather and the wheels complainin’ to the gods, trying to pass the corner of the barracks where there was a narrow opening between the buildings.

“Now a good mule-driver is the littlest, orneriest speck in the human line that’s known to the microscope, but when you get a poor one, he’d spoil one of them cholera germs you read about just by contact.  The leader of this bunch was worse than the worst; strong on whip-arm, but surprising weak on judgment.  He tried to make the turn, run plump into the corner of the building, stopped, backed, swung, and proceeded to get into grief.

“The mules being hot and nervous, he sent them all to the loco patch instanter.  They began to plunge and turn and back and snarl.  Before you could say ‘Craps! you lose,’ them shave-tails was giving the grandest exhibition of animal idiocy in the Territory, barring the teamster.  He follered their trail to the madhouse, yanking the mouths out of them, cruel and vicious.

“Now, one mule can cause a heap of tribulation, and six mules can break a man’s heart, but there wasn’t no excuse for that driver to stand up on his hind legs, close his eyes, and throw thirty foot of lash into that plunging buckin’, white-eyed mess.  When he did it, all the little words inside of me began to foam and fizzle like sedlitz; out they came, biting, in mouthfuls, and streams, and squirts, backwards, sideways, and through my nose.