for it, too, for you never seen such a game of driving as that feller put up in all your life.  The Lord save us!  He cut around one corner of a mountain, so that for the longest second I’ve lived through, my left foot hung over about a thousand feet of fresh air.  I’d have had time to write my will before I touched bottom if we’d gone over.  I don’t know as I turned pale, but my hair ain’t been of the same rosy complexion since.

“‘Well!’ says Aggy in a surprised tone of voice when we got all four wheels on the ground again.  ‘Here we are!’ says he.  ’Who’d have suspected it?  I thought he was going to take the short cut down to the creek.’

“The driver turned round with one corner of his lip h’isted—­a dead ringer of a mean man—­Says he to Aggy, ’Yer a funny bloke, ain’t yer?’

“‘Why!’ says Ag, ’that’s for you to say—­wouldn’t look well coming from me—­but if you press me, I’ll admit I give birth to a little gem now and then.’

“Our bold buck puts on a great swagger.  ’Well yer needn’t be funny in this waggon,’ says he.  ‘The pair of yer spongin’ a ride!  Yer needn’t be gay—­yer hear me, don’t cher?’

“‘Why, I hear you as plain as though you set right next me,’ says Ag.  ’Now, you listen and see if I’m audible at the same range—­You’re a blasted chump!’ he roars, in a tone of voice that would have carried forty mile.  Did you hear that, Red?’ he asks very innocent.  I was so hot at the driver’s sass—­the cussed low-downness of doing a feller a favour and then heaving it at him—­that you could have lit a match on me anywheres, but to save me I couldn’t help laughing—­Ag had the comicallest way!

“At that the driver begins to larrup the horses.  I ain’t the kind to feel faint when a cayuse gets what’s coming to him for raising the devil, but to see that lad whale his team because there wasn’t nothing else he dared hit, got me on my hind legs.  I nestled one hand in his hair and twisted his ugly mug back.

“‘Quit that!’ says I.

“‘You let me be—­I ain’t hurting you,’ he hollers.

“‘That ain’t to say I won’t be hurting you soon,’ says I.  ’You put the bud on them horses again, and I’ll boot the spine of your back up through the top of your head till it stands out like a flag-staff.  Just one more touch, and you get it!’ says I.

“He didn’t open his mouth again till we come to the river.  Then he pulled up.  ’This is about as far as I care to carry you two gents for nothin’,’ he says.  ’Of course you’re two to one, and I can’t do nothing if you see fit to bull the thing through.  But I’ll say this:  if either one or both of you roosters has got the least smell of a gentleman about him, he won’t have to be told his company ain’t wanted twice.’

“Now, mind you, Ag and me didn’t have the first cussed thing—­not grub, nor blankets, nor gun, nor nothing; and this the feller well knew.

“‘Red,’ says Aggy, ’what do you say to pulling this thing apart and seeing what makes it act so?’