Then three disappeared in the gloom toward the several ambushes, and the other three disappeared down the road toward Virginia.

It was depressingly still, and miserably cold.  Now this whole thing was a practical joke, and the robbers were personal friends of ours in disguise, and twenty more lay hidden within ten feet of us during the whole operation, listening.  Mike knew all this, and was in the joke, but I suspected nothing of it.  To me it was most uncomfortably genuine.  When we had stood there in the middle of the road five minutes, like a couple of idiots, with our hands aloft, freezing to death by inches, Mike’s interest in the joke began to wane.  He said: 

“The time’s up, now, aint it?”

“No, you keep still.  Do you want to take any chances with these bloody savages?”

Presently Mike said: 

“Now the time’s up, anyway.  I’m freezing.”

“Well freeze.  Better freeze than carry your brains home in a basket.  Maybe the time is up, but how do we know?—­got no watch to tell by.  I mean to give them good measure.  I calculate to stand here fifteen minutes or die.  Don’t you move.”

So, without knowing it, I was making one joker very sick of his contract.  When we took our arms down at last, they were aching with cold and fatigue, and when we went sneaking off, the dread I was in that the time might not yet be up and that we would feel bullets in a moment, was not sufficient to draw all my attention from the misery that racked my stiffened body.

The joke of these highwayman friends of ours was mainly a joke upon themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold hill-top two full hours before I came, and there was very little fun in that; they were so chilled that it took them a couple of weeks to get warm again.  Moreover, I never had a thought that they would kill me to get money which it was so perfectly easy to get without any such folly, and so they did not really frighten me bad enough to make their enjoyment worth the trouble they had taken.  I was only afraid that their weapons would go off accidentally.  Their very numbers inspired me with confidence that no blood would be intentionally spilled.  They were not smart; they ought to have sent only one highwayman, with a double-barrelled shot gun, if they desired to see the author of this volume climb a tree.

However, I suppose that in the long run I got the largest share of the joke at last; and in a shape not foreseen by the highwaymen; for the chilly exposure on the “divide” while I was in a perspiration gave me a cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease and kept my hands idle some three months, besides costing me quite a sum in doctor’s bills.  Since then I play no practical jokes on people and generally lose my temper when one is played upon me.