ck his arms
and wove them through the pickets, and stood there on one leg looking
over his shoulder as the two women disappeared into the Widow's cabin.

Dawn comes slowly down in these dark, deep, wooded canons of the
Sierras. Morning seems to be battling with the night. Night is
entrenched in the woods, and retreats only by inches--the Battle of the
Wilderness.

In the steel-gray dawn, cold and sharp, Limber Tim heard a cry that
knocked him loose from the fence. He picked himself together, and again
twisted himself into the pickets; but all the time he kept seeing Bunker
Hill pushing back her sleeve, holding up her arm in the ghostly light of
the pine-log fire, and saying, "Blood it is! Will you believe me now?"

"Blood," mused the man. "Somebody's hurt. Somebody's hurt awful bad,
too, or they wouldn't keep a feller a-standin' agin a fence the whole
blessed night."

The man's teeth began to chatter. The thought of blood and the bleak
cold morning kept them smiting together as if he had had an ague.

A man in great gum boots came screeching by the cabin; his nose was
pointed straight for the Howling Wilderness, but backing against Limber
Tim as he hung up against the fence, stopped, and asked timidly and very
respectfully of the Widow.

Limber held his head thoughtfully to one side, as if he was trying to
balance the important facts in his mind, and reveal only just so much
of the condition of the Widow, or Sandy, or Bunker Hill, or whoever it
was that was hurt, as was best, and no more, but for a time was silent.

A thought struck him, and he mused: Sandy's cut his foot, or p'raps it's
Bunker Hill shot herself with that darned pistol she allers packs in her
breeches' pocket.

"Well, an' 'ow's the Widder?" The man was getting impatient for his
drink.

"It ain't the Widder at all. It's Sandy. Sandy's cut his foot--cut his
foot last night a cuttin' wood in the dark. That's what's the matter."

Limber Tim pecked his head, pursed up his mouth, and for the first time
in his life, perhaps, felt that he was really a man of some consequence.

"By the holy poker! thought it was the Widder."

"Not much. It's Sandy. Cut his foot, I tell yer. Blood clean up to his
elbows. Blood all over the house. Bunker Hill all over blood. Hell's a
poppin', I tell yer." And poor Limber Tim so excited himself by this
recital, that he broke loose from the fence, and chattered his teeth
together like a chipmunk with a hazel-nut.

Th