Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/211

 THE INVALID S STORY

break for the door; and out there Thompson swabbed his face with his bandanna and said in a kind of disheartened way :

&quot;It ain t no use. We can t buck agin him. He just utilizes everything we put up to modify him with, and gives it his own flavor and plays it back on us. Why, Cap, don t you know, it s as much as a hundred times worse in there now than it was when he first got a-going. I never did see one of em warm up to his work so, and take such a dumnation interest in it. No, sir, I never did, as long as I ve ben on the road; and I ve carried a many a one of em, as I was telling you.&quot;

We went in again after we were frozen pretty stiff ; but my, we couldn t stay in, now. So we just waltzed back and forth, freezing, and thawing, and stifling, by turns. In about an hour we stopped at another station ; and as we left it Thompson came in with a bag, and said

&quot;Cap, I m a-going to chance him once more- just this once; and if we don t fetch him this time, the thing for us to do, is to just throw up the sponge and withdraw from the canvass. That s the way / put it up.&quot;

He had brought a lot of chicken feathers, and dried apples, and leaf tobacco, and rags, and old shoes, and sulphur, and asafetida, and one thing or another; and he piled them on a breadth of sheet iron in the middle of the floor, and set fire to them.

When they got well started, I couldn t see, myself, how even the corpse could stand it. All that went before was just simply poetry to that smell but

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