down on his two shoulders, said tremulously, "Limber Tim."

Sandy had laid hold of him as if he had determined to never let him go
again, and the man fairly winced under his great vice-like grasp. He
looked at the back log on the fire, looked left and right, but did not
look Sandy in the face. If he had, he would for the first time in all
his timid experience have been able to have had it all his own way.

"O Limber!"

Sandy had fished up one of his hands high enough to pull his hat down
over his eyes, and now nothing was to be seen but a hat rim and the
fringe of a grizzly beard.

Limber Tim looked up. He never before had heard his old partner's voice
troubled, and he was very sorry, and began to look, or to try to look,
Sandy in the face. Up went a big hand from a shoulder, back went the old
hat, and then Limber Tim looked to the left at a lot of picks and pans,
and tom irons, and crevicing spoons, that lay up against the wall, but
did not speak.

"Limber Tim! I tell you. My--my--"

Sandy choked. He never had yet been able to call her his wife. He had
tried to do so over and over again. His dear little wife had taught him
many things--had made him, in fact, another man, but she never could get
him to speak of her to the other miners but as "the Widow." He had gone
out by himself and practiced it in the dark to himself; he was certain
he could say it in the crowd, but somehow just at the moment he tried to
say it he was certain some one was thinking about it just as he was,
was watching him, and so it always and for ever stuck in his throat. How
he loved her! How tender he was to her all the time! How he did little
else but think of her and her happiness day and night; but he had been a
savage so long, had been with the "boys" so much, that he could not find
it in his power to say that one dear word. It was like a new convert
trying to pray in public in one of the great camp meetings of the West;
or to stand up before all his neighbors and confess his sins.

He stood still only a second; in fact, all this took but a moment, for
Sandy was in a terrible hurry. Limber Tim had never seen him in such a
hurry before. Up shot the hand, down slid the hat, and Sandy was quite
hidden away again. It was a moment of terrible embarrassment. When an
Englishman is embarrassed he takes snuff; when a Yankee is embarrassed
he whips out a jack-knife and falls to whittling anything that he can
find, not excepting the ends of his f