too, and they looks at me startled. Then the doctor kind
o' laughs and says:

"Why, it's the young blacksmith!"

Looey, he says, looking at me hard and suspicious:

"What kind of a scheme are you talking about?"

"Why," says I, "to get that outfit of yourn."

"You've been listening to us," says Looey. Looey was one of them
quiet-looking fellers that never laughed much nor talked much. Looey,
he never made fun of nobody, which the doctor was always doing, and I
wouldn't of cared to make fun of Looey much, either.

"Yes," I says, "I been laying here fur quite a spell, and quite
natcheral I listened to you, as any one else would of done. And mebby I
can get that team and wagon of yourn without it costing you a cent."

Well, they didn't know what to say. They asts me how, but I says to
leave it all to me. "Walk right along down this here crick," I says,
"till you get to where it comes out'n the woods and runs acrost the road
in under an iron bridge. That's about a half a mile east. Jest after the
road crosses the bridge it forks. Take the right fork and walk another
half a mile and you'll see a little yaller-painted schoolhouse setting
lonesome on a sand hill. They ain't no school in it now. You wait there
fur me," I says, "fur a couple of hours. After that if I ain't there
you'll know I can't make it. But I think I'll make it."

They looks at each other and they looks at me, and then they go off a
little piece and talk low, and then the doctor says to me:

"Rube," he says, "I don't know how you can work anything on us that
hasn't been worked already. We've got nothing more we can lose. You go
to it, Rube." And they started off.

So I went over town. Jake Smith was setting on the piazza in front of
his hotel, chawing and spitting tobacco, with his feet agin the railing
like he always done, and one of his eyes squinched up and his hat over
the other one.

"Jake," I says, "where's that there doctor?"

Jake, he spit careful afore he answered, and he pulled his long,
scraggly moustache careful, and he squinched his eyes at me. Jake was a
careful man in everything he done.

"I dunno, Danny," he says. "Why?"

"Well," I says, "Hank sent me over to get that wagon and them hosses of
theirn and finish that job."

"That there wagon," says Jake, "is in my barn, with Si Emery watching
her, and she has got to stay there till the law lets her loose." I
figgered to myself Jake could use that team and wagon in his busines