At the first feeble blaze Corporal’s spirits rose so promptly that he had to be restrained.

“Easy there!  Corp,” cautioned Phelan.  “A fire’s like a woman, you can’t be sure of it too soon.  And, dog alive, stop wagging your tail, don’t you see it makes a draft?”

The fire capriciously would, then it wouldn’t.  A tiny flame played tantalizingly along the top of a stick only to go sullenly out when it reached the end.  Match after match was sacrificed to the cause, but at last, down deep under the surface, there was a steady, reassuring, cheerful crackle that made Phelan sit back on his heels, and remark complacently: 

“They most generally come around, in the end!”

In five minutes the fire was burning bright, Corporal was dreaming of meaty bones in far fence corners, and Phelan, less free from the incumbrances of civilization, was divesting himself of his rain-soaked garments.

From one of the innumerable pockets of his old cutaway coat he took a comb and brush and clothes-brush, and carefully deposited them before the fire.  Then from around his neck he removed a small leather case, hung by a string and holding a razor.  His treasured toilet articles thus being cared for, he turned his attention to the contents of his dripping bundle.  A suit of underwear and a battered old copy of Eli Perkins were ruefully examined, and spread out to dry.

The fire, while it lasted, was doing admirable service, but the wood supply was limited, and Phelan saw that he must take immediate advantage of the heat.  How to dry the underwear which he wore was the question which puzzled him, and he wrestled with it for several moments before an inspiration came.

“I’ll borrow some duds from the scarecrow!” he said half aloud, and went forth immediately to execute his idea.

The rain had ceased, but the fields were still afloat, and Phelan waded ankle deep through the slush grass, to where the scarecrow raised his threatening arms against the twilight sky.

“Beggars and borrowers shouldn’t be choosers,” said Phelan, as he divested the figure of its ragged trousers and coat, “but I have a strong feeling in my mind that these habiliments ain’t going to become me.  Who’s your tailor, friend?”

The scarecrow, reduced now to an old straw hat and a necktie, maintained a dignified and oppressive silence.

“Well, he ain’t on to the latest cut,” continued Phelan, wringing the water out of the coat.  “But maybe these here is your pajamas?  Don’t tell me I disturbed you after you’d retired for the night?  Very well then, aurevoy.”

With the clothes under his arm he made his way back to the shed, and divesting himself of his own raiment he got into his borrowed property.

By this time the fire had died down, and the place was in semi-darkness.  Phelan threw on a handful of sticks and, as the blaze flared up, he caught his first clear sight of his newly acquired clothes.  They were ragged and weather-stained, and circled about with broad, unmistakable stripes.