“I want three dollars,” he said.

We got on our feet and came nearer to him to confer.  We expressed an absolute and devoted willingness to give him three dollars, but explained our wretched luck that compelled our desire to remain unsatisfied.  The shack was incredulous.  He dickered with us.  He would compromise for two dollars.  We regretted our condition of poverty.  He said uncomplimentary things, called us sons of toads, and damned us from hell to breakfast.  Then he threatened.  He explained that if we didn’t dig up, he’d lock us in and carry us on to White River and turn us over to the authorities.  He also explained all about the quarries at Rutland.

Now that shack thought he had us dead to rights.  Was not he guarding the one door, and had he not himself latched the opposite door but a few minutes before?  When he began talking about quarries, the frightened gay-cat started to sidle across to the other door.  The shack laughed loud and long.  “Don’t be in a hurry,” he said; “I locked that door on the outside at the last stop.”  So implicitly did he believe the door to be locked that his words carried conviction.  The gay-cat believed and was in despair.

The shack delivered his ultimatum.  Either we should dig up two dollars, or he would lock us in and turn us over to the constable at White River—­and that meant ninety days and the quarries.  Now, gentle reader, just suppose that the other door had been locked.  Behold the precariousness of human life.  For lack of a dollar, I’d have gone to the quarries and served three months as a convict slave.  So would the gay-cat.  Count me out, for I was hopeless; but consider the gay-cat.  He might have come out, after those ninety days, pledged to a life of crime.  And later he might have broken your skull, even your skull, with a blackjack in an endeavor to take possession of the money on your person—­and if not your skull, then some other poor and unoffending creature’s skull.

But the door was unlocked, and I alone knew it.  The gay-cat and I begged for mercy.  I joined in the pleading and wailing out of sheer cussedness, I suppose.  But I did my best.  I told a “story” that would have melted the heart of any mug; but it didn’t melt the heart of that sordid money-grasper of a shack.  When he became convinced that we didn’t have any money, he slid the door shut and latched it, then lingered a moment on the chance that we had fooled him and that we would now offer him the two dollars.

Then it was that I let out a few links.  I called him a son of a toad.  I called him all the other things he had called me.  And then I called him a few additional things.  I came from the West, where men knew how to swear, and I wasn’t going to let any mangy shack on a measly New England “jerk” put it over me in vividness and vigor of language.  At first the shack tried to laugh it down.  Then he made the mistake of attempting to reply.  I let out a few more links, and I cut him to the raw and therein rubbed winged and flaming epithets.  Nor was my fine frenzy all whim and literary; I was indignant at this vile creature, who, in default of a dollar, would consign me to three months of slavery.  Furthermore, I had a sneaking idea that he got a “drag” out of the constable fees.