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 still too proud to appeal to women to help him in his helplessness.

"I guess we'll drive on," said Maud.

She pulled up the slack of the dangling lines, turning a look full of appreciation for his comical fix on Colonel Withers.

"No, no!" Louise checked her. "I'm going to turn him loose."

"I don't believe we'd better butt in on anybody's joke," Maud advised.

"I wouldn't ask the favor of you, young lady," said Withers, directing his appeal to Louise, "if there was a chance of anybody else comin' along. I may have to hang here a week if you go by."

"We can tell somebody in town, they can come over," Maud said, speaking for the benefit of Louise, upon whom the old rascal's appeal was not lost.

"It would be a shame to leave him suffering here," Louise declared. She jumped out of the buckboard as she spoke, starting to Withers's relief.

"You'd better think it over a minute, kid," Maud counseled, with a shrewd intimation behind her words, a more knowing gleam in her humorous eyes. It was the fine point of the joke that passed over Louise.

"There ought to be a knife in that box at the end of the wagon," Withers suggested. "You could work faster with that."

The cook's butcher knife was there, a prodigious instrument with the shin-bone of an ox for a handle. Maud Kelly sat laughing until the buckboard shook