“Maybe I can go to sleep again and dream I’m dead,” said Jim, in growing despair.

“If you kin, and me around, you can beat brother John all to cream,” she responded, smoothing out the mended overalls and laying them down on a stool.  “Now you kin give me your shirt.”

Jim galvanically gathered the blankets in a tightened noose about his neck.

“Hold on!” he said.  “Hold on!  This shirt is a bran’-new article, and you’d spoil it if you come within twenty-five yards of it with a needle.”

“Where’s your old one?” she demanded, atilt for something more to repair.  Her gaze searched the bunks swiftly, and Jim was sure she was looking for the little man behind him.  “Where’s your old one went?” she repeated.

“I turned it over on a friend of mine,” drawled Jim, who meant he had deftly reversed it on himself.  “It’s a poor shirt that won’t work both ways.”

“Ain’t there nuthin’ more I kin mend?” she asked.

“Not unless it’s somethin’ of Doc’s down to your lovely little home.”

“Oh, I ain’t agoin’ to go, if that’s what you’re drivin’ at,” she answered, as she swiftly assembled the soiled utensils of the cuisine.  “I’ll tidy up this here pig-pen if it takes a week, and you kin hop up and come down easy.”

“I wouldn’t have you go for nothing,” drawled Jim, squirming with abnormal impatience to be up and doing.  “Angel’s visits are comin’ fewer and fewer in a box every day.”

“That’s bogus,” answered the lady.  “I sense your oilin’ me over.  You git up and go and git a fresh pail of water.”

“I’d like to,” Jim said, convincingly, “but the only time I ever broke my arm was when I went out for a bucket of water before breakfast.”

“You ain’t agoin’ is what you mean, with all them come-a-long-way-round excuses,” she conjectured.  “You’ve got the name of bein’ the laziest-jointed, mos’ shiftless man into camp.”

“Wal,” drawled the helpless miner, “a town without a horrible example is deader than the spikes in Adam’s coffin.  And the next best thing to being a livin’ example is to hang around the house where one of ’em stays in his bunk all mornin’.”

“If that’s another of them underhanded hints of your’n, you might as well save your breath,” she replied.  “I’ll go and git the water myself, fer them dishes is goin’ to git cleaned.”

She took up the bucket at once.  Outside, the sounds of some one scooting rapidly away brought to Jim a thought of Keno’s recently demonstrated presence of mind.

Cautiously sitting up in the berth, so soon as Miss Doc had disappeared with the pail, he hurriedly drew on his boots.  A sound of returning footsteps came to his startled ears.  He leaped back up in the bunk, boots and all, and covered himself with the blanket, to the startlement of the timid little chap, who was sitting there to watch developments.  Both drew down as Miss Doc reappeared in the door.