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distaste for the teamster. "I don’t haff to. I'm genully with myse'f most of the time."

The teamster was not piqued at this answer but burst into loud brief laughter. "Well, I be damned, I see you air a ole man full of ketches." He looked at the old Squire with the crude superiority of youth. "Well, you've had a lot o' time to learn 'em in. We grow wiser an' weaker, as the rabbit said when the dawg chawed him up."

"I don't know whether you air any wiser or not," said the Squire stiffly, "but you certainly look chawed up some yorese'f. Where's yore waggin, an' what happened to ye?"

"Comin' down here to work on the railroad last night an' my team run away an' kinder strung my waggin out over three or four miles of road, and fin'ly wropped what was left aroun' a black jack; I figgered we had gone fur enough fer one night, so I got my mules stopped, cut 'em some grass fer fodder, an' jess laid down an' went to sleep."

"I guess you was pretty well lit up when all that was goin' on, wasn't ye?" asked the Squire with the teetotaller's scorn of the tippler in his voice.

"Wuz when I started," agreed the teamster frankly, "but I was sober as a jedge when I got 'em stopped. I'm like that. Whisky ain't got no holt on me. I sober up the minute anything happens."

This ability to react in crises must have touched even the Squire, for he asked somewhat drily, "Have ye had any breakfust?"

"Nope. I calkerlate to git some cheese an' crackers in Arntown."

"Well, we're jest about to set down," invited the Squire without enthusiasm. "Might come on in an' jine us."

"Don't keer ef I do."

The stranger reined his mules to the side of the road and hitched them to the barn fence, and the three men went into the house. As they walked through the hall into the kitchen the old man called out, "Ma, here's a stranger I'm takin' in. He's purty bad bunged up from a runaway." The phrase