“Don’t do that, Jack.  What do you want to harm him for?  What has he done?”

“Well, then, I won’t kill him, but I ought to, because he is a fraud.”

We asked him why, but he said it was no matter.  We asked him why, once or twice, as we walked back to the camp but he still said it was no matter.  But late at night, when he was sitting in a thoughtful mood on the bed, we asked him again and he said: 

“Well, it don’t matter; I don’t mind it now, but I did not like it today, you know, because I don’t tell any thing that isn’t so, and I don’t think the Colonel ought to, either.  But he did; he told us at prayers in the Pilgrims’ tent, last night, and he seemed as if he was reading it out of the Bible, too, about this country flowing with milk and honey, and about the voice of the turtle being heard in the land.  I thought that was drawing it a little strong, about the turtles, any how, but I asked Mr. Church if it was so, and he said it was, and what Mr. Church tells me, I believe.  But I sat there and watched that turtle nearly an hour today, and I almost burned up in the sun; but I never heard him sing.  I believe I sweated a double handful of sweat—–­I know I did—­because it got in my eyes, and it was running down over my nose all the time; and you know my pants are tighter than any body else’s—­Paris foolishness—­and the buckskin seat of them got wet with sweat, and then got dry again and began to draw up and pinch and tear loose—­it was awful—­but I never heard him sing.  Finally I said, This is a fraud—­that is what it is, it is a fraud—­and if I had had any sense I might have known a cursed mud-turtle couldn’t sing.  And then I said, I don’t wish to be hard on this fellow, and I will just give him ten minutes to commence; ten minutes —­and then if he don’t, down goes his building.  But he didn’t commence, you know.  I had staid there all that time, thinking may be he might, pretty soon, because he kept on raising his head up and letting it down, and drawing the skin over his eyes for a minute and then opening them out again, as if he was trying to study up something to sing, but just as the ten minutes were up and I was all beat out and blistered, he laid his blamed head down on a knot and went fast asleep.”

“It was a little hard, after you had waited so long.”

“I should think so.  I said, Well, if you won’t sing, you shan’t sleep, any way; and if you fellows had let me alone I would have made him shin out of Galilee quicker than any turtle ever did yet.  But it isn’t any matter now—­let it go.  The skin is all off the back of my neck.”

About ten in the morning we halted at Joseph’s Pit.  This is a ruined Khan of the Middle Ages, in one of whose side courts is a great walled and arched pit with water in it, and this pit, one tradition says, is the one Joseph’s brethren cast him into.  A more authentic tradition, aided by the geography of the country, places the pit in Dothan, some two days’ journey from here.  However, since there are many who believe in this present pit as the true one, it has its interest.