“Slep’ in yer boots, Lou, didn’t yer?”
The last forty hours had been sufficiently heavy to break another man. But Lou grinned, dredging brown sugar into his pannikin.
“Who roped in Art Scannell?” he said.
“Give us another. The boss said you did it. We runned till we was sick of it. Then we comed back—down the old track.”
“That’s a lie,” said Danny, cheerfully. “We was sick of it ’fore we started. Who was the idjit as found him? You or Randal?”
“It was a close thing. But Randal claimed the stakes—which were Art.”
“He’d sooner be claimin’ the Miss-takes,” giggled the cook, tossing tin plates into the sink, and Tod returned, wild-haired, to the table.
“Well, now, but that’s a pity,” he said. “I’d putt by two masses for the dirty sowl of him, which I was takin’ the money down to Father Denis to-day.”
“Hand it in fur Jimmie’s soul,” suggested Danny. “He cud do wi’ suthin’ ter kip it from drippin’ out o’ his boot-heels every time he runs away.”
Jimmie’s life at Mains was a day old. But half the boys on the station had made his nose bleed at the district school in years past—unless Ted Douglas were by. Now Douglas put a leg over the narrow table, and followed it.
