“Ah-h want yuh!” yelled Big Medicine, quite purple but far from surrender, and gave a leap.

“Go get me!” shouted Irish, whipping down the sides of his mount with his hat.

Big Medicine answered the taunt by a queer, twisted plunge which he had saved for the last.  It brought Irish spread-eagling over his head, and it landed him fairly in the middle of Patsy’s great pan of soft bread “sponge”—­and landed him upon his head into the bargain.  Irish wriggled there a moment and came up absolutely unrecognizable and a good deal dazed.  Big Medicine rolled helplessly in the grass, laughing his big, bellowing laugh.

It was straight into that laugh and the great mouth from where it issued, that Patsy, beside himself with rage at the accident, deposited all the soft dough which was not clinging to the head and face of Irish.  He was not content with that.  While the Happy Family roared appreciation of the spectacle, Patsy returned with a kettle of meat and tried to land that neatly upon the dough.

“Py cosh, if dat iss der vay you wants your grub, py cosh, dat iss der vay you gets it alreatty!” he brought the coffee-boiler and threw that also at the two, and followed it with a big basin of stewed corn.

Irish, all dough as he was, went for him blindly and grappled with him, and it was upon this turbulent scene which Chip looked first when he rode up.  The Happy Family crowded around him gasping and tried to explain.

“They were doing some rough-riding—­”

“By golly, Patsy no business to set his bread dough on the ground!”

“He’s throwed away all the supper there is, and I betche—­”

“Mamma!  Yuh sure missed it, Chip.  You ought—­”

“By cripes, if that Dutch—­”

“Break away there, Irish!” shouted Chip, dismounting hurriedly.  “Has it got so you must fight an old man like that?”

“Py cosh, I’ll fight mit him alreatty!  I’ll fight mit any mans vat shpoils mine bread.  Maybe I’m old yet but I ain’t dead yet und I could fight—­” The words came disjointedly, mere punctuation points to his wild sparring.

It was plain that Irish, furious though he was, was trying not to hurt Patsy very much; but it took four men to separate them for all that.  When they had dragged Irish perforce down to the creek by which they had camped, and had yelled to Big Medicine to come on and feed the fish, quiet should have been restored—­but it was not.

Patsy was, in American parlance, running amuck.  He was jumbling three languages together into an indistinguishable tumult of sound and he was emptying the cook-tent of everything which his stout, German muscles could fling from it.  Not a thing did he leave that was eatable and the dishes within his reach he scattered recklessly to all the winds of heaven.  When one venturesome soul after another approached to calm him, he found it expedient to duck and run to cover.  Patsy’s aim was terribly exact.