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Told In The Storm
by
“Now, when I reach camp I find there ain’t any fresh grub to speak of. But I can’t get away, so I stick on until spring. See! In time we begin to have scurvy something terrible. One man out of every five cashes in. I’m living in a cabin with a lot of Frenchmen and we bury seven from this one shack–seven, that’s all! It gets on my nerves finally. I don’t like dead men. Now, the last two who fall sick is old man Manard and my pal, young Pete De Foe. Pete has a ten-dollar gold piece and Manard owns a dog. Inasmuch as they both knew that they can’t weather it out till the break-up, Pete bets his ten dollars against the dog that he’ll die before Manard. Well, this is something new in the sporting line, and we begin to string our bets pretty free. There ain’t much excitement going on, so the boys visit the cabin every day, look over the entries, then go outside and make book. I open up a Paris mutuel. The old man is a seven-to-one favorite at the start because he had all the best of it on form, but the youngster puts up a grand race. For three weeks they seesaw back and forth. First one looks like a winner, then the other. It’s as pretty running as I ever see. Then Pete lets out a wonderful burst of speed, ‘zings’ over the last quarter, noses out Manard at the wire, and brings home the money. He dies at 3 A.M. and wins by four hours. I cop eighty-four dollars, six pairs of suspenders, a keg of wire nails, and a frying-pan, which constitutes all the circulating medium of the camp. I’m the stakeholder for the late deceased also, so I find myself the administrator of Manard’s dog and the ten dollars that Pete put up.
“Now, seeing that it had been a killing finish, we arrange for a double-barreled burial and a swell funeral. The ground is froze, of course, but we dig two holes through the gravel till we break a pick-point and decide to let it go at that. The ‘Bare-headed’ Kid is clergyman because he has a square-cut coat that buttons up the front to his chin. There ain’t any Bible in camp, so he read some recipes out of a baking-powder cook-book, after which Deaf Mike tries to play ‘Taps’ on the cornet. But he’s held the horn in his mit during the services, and, the temperature being forty degrees below freezo, when he wets his lips to play they stick to the mouthpiece and crab the hymn. As a whole, it is an enjoyable affair, however, and the best-conducted funeral of the winter. Everybody has a good time, though nothing rough.
“Now, I’ve been friendly to young Pete De Foe–him and I bunked together–and the next night he comes to me, saying that he can’t rest. I see him as plain as I see you.
“‘What’s wrong?’ says I. ‘Are you cold?’
“‘No. The ground is chilly, but it ain’t that. Manard, the old hellion, won’t let me sleep. He’s doing a sand jig on my grave. He says I won that bet crooked and died ahead of time just to get his dog. He’s sore on you, too.’
“‘What’s he sore on me for?’ says I.
“‘He says he’s an old man, and he’d ‘a’ died first if you hadn’t put in with me to double-cross him. He’s laying for you,’ says Pete.
“Well, I’m pretty sick myself, with a four months’ diet of pea soup and oatmeal, and when I wake up I think it’s a dream. But the next night Pete is back again, complaining worse than ever. It seems the ghost of old man Manard is still buck-and-winging on Pete’s coffin, and he begs me to come down and call the old reprobate off so that he can get some rest. He comes back the third night, the fourth, and the fifth, and by and by Manard himself comes up to the cabin and begins to abuse me. He says he wants his dog back, but naturally I can’t give it to him. It gets so that I can’t sleep at all. Finally, when Pete ain’t sitting on my bunk Manard is calling me names and gritting his teeth at me. I begin to fall off in weight like a jockey in a sweat bath. It gets so I have to sit up all night in a chair and make the fellers prod me in the stomach with a stick whenever I doze off. I tell you, stranger, it was worse than horrible. I don’t know how I made it through till spring.