“Well,” he remarked, wiping away the sweat, “if you won’t hang you’ll shoot.  Some men wasn’t born to be hanged, anyway.”

“An’ it’s a pretty mess as you’ll make o’ this ’ere cabin floor.”  Cardegee was fighting for time.  “Now, look ’ere, I’ll tell you wot we do; we’ll lay our ’eads ‘longside an’ reason together.  You’ve lost some dust.  You say as ‘ow I know, an’ I say as ’ow I don’t.  Let’s get a hobservation an’ shape a course—­”

“Vast heavin’!” Kent dashed in, maliciously imitating the other’s enunciation.  “I’m going to shape all the courses of this shebang, and you observe; and if you do anything more, I’ll bore you as sure as Moses!”

“For the sake of my mother—­”

“Whom God have mercy upon if she loves you.  Ah!  Would you?” He frustrated a hostile move on the part of the other by pressing the cold muzzle against his forehead.  “Lay quiet, now!  If you lift as much as a hair, you’ll get it.”

It was rather an awkward task, with the trigger of the gun always within pulling distance of the finger; but Kent was a weaver, and in a few minutes had the sailor tied hand and foot.  Then he dragged him without and laid him by the side of the cabin, where he could overlook the river and watch the sun climb to the meridian.

“Now I’ll give you till noon, and then—­”

“Wot?”

“You’ll be hitting the brimstone trail.  But if you speak up, I’ll keep you till the next bunch of mounted police come by.”

“Well, Gawd blime me, if this ain’t a go!  ’Ere I be, innercent as a lamb, an’ ‘ere you be, lost all o’ your top ‘amper an’ out o’ your reckonin’, run me foul an’ goin’ to rake me into ‘ell-fire.  You bloomin’ old pirut!  You—­”

Jim Cardegee loosed the strings of his profanity and fairly outdid himself.  Jacob Kent brought out a stool that he might enjoy it in comfort.  Having exhausted all the possible combinations of his vocabulary, the sailor quieted down to hard thinking, his eyes constantly gauging the progress of the sun, which tore up the eastern slope of the heavens with unseemly haste.  His dogs, surprised that they had not long since been put to harness, crowded around him.  His helplessness appealed to the brutes.  They felt that something was wrong, though they knew not what, and they crowded about, howling their mournful sympathy.

“Chook!  Mush-on! you Siwashes!” he cried, attempting, in a vermicular way, to kick at them, and discovering himself to be tottering on the edge of a declivity.  As soon as the animals had scattered, he devoted himself to the significance of that declivity which he felt to be there but could not see.  Nor was he long in arriving at a correct conclusion.  In the nature of things, he figured, man is lazy.  He does no more than he has to.  When he builds a cabin he must put dirt on the roof.  From these premises it was logical that he should carry that dirt no further than was absolutely necessary.