Then she let
go and felt about with her hands till she found his right arm jammed
between the logs. These she could not move, but she thrust between
them one of the roof-poles which had underlaid the dirt and moss. It
was a rude handspike and hardly equal to the work, for when she threw
her weight upon the free end it bent and crackled. Heedful of the
warning, she came in a couple of feet and swung upon it tentatively and
carefully till something gave and Jacob Welse shoved his muddy face
into the air.
He drew half a dozen great breaths, and burst out, "But that tastes
good!" And then, throwing a quick glance about him, Frona, Del Bishop
is a most veracious man."
"Why?" she asked, perplexedly.
"Because he said you'd do, you know."
He kissed her, and they both spat the mud from their lips, laughing.
Courbertin floundered round a corner of the wreckage.
"Never was there such a man!" he cried, gleefully. "He is mad, crazy!
There is no appeasement. His skull is cracked by the fall, and his
tobacco is gone. It is chiefly the tobacco which is lamentable."
But his skull was not cracked, for it was merely a slit of the scalp of
five inches or so.
"You'll have to wait till the others come back. I can't carry." Jacob
Welse pointed to his right arm, which hung dead. "Only wrenched," he
explained. "No bones broken.
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