“I’ll take that bet!” yelled the old man. “We’ll put up our money with Ike Spargle this minute; but I don’t want your odds. I’ll bet you even money.” Eugene shook his head as if he pitied the ol’ man, an’ he sez, “Haven’t you never travelled none, or seen a zoological garden?” “Yes, I’ve travelled some, an’ I’ve seen all kinds o’ gardens,” flares back the ol’ man; “but what I want now is to fix up this bet.” “Who’ll be the judges?” sez Eugene. “I don’t care a snap. Any man who can see through the holes in a ladder’ll be able to decide between the claims o’ two squirrels. Ike Spargle an’ Bill Thompson can be the judges.” “There has to be three,” sez Eugene. “We’ll have Dan Stedman be the other.” So they put up the money an’ Eugene was to have six weeks to get his squirrel; an’ from that on we begun to divide up into rival camps. The’ wasn’t any tree squirrels out in that neck o’ the woods, an’ we had all forgot what wild squirrels really was like. We knew the’ was ground-squirrels, red squirrels, gray squirrels, an’ flyin’-squirrels—although an argument was started about there bein’ flyin’-fish all right, but no flyin’-squirrels, which would have ended in warfare if Eugene hadn’t been handy to settle it. You wouldn’t think that a little thing like a bet about the size of a squirrel would take the way it did; but Eugene was so confident on his side, an’ ol’ man Dort was so dead sure of Ben Butler, that the rest of us split up an’ we each had a little side bet on the outcome. It seemed a tarnation long time while we was waitin’; but in a little over a month, Eugene got a big box which he took into his back room without lettin’ even the fellers who had backed his squirrel get a peep at it. From that on we got shaved twice a day an’ our heads washed till the hair started to change color; so that Eugene’s trade was so improved that even if he lost the bet, he was money ahead; but he scoffed the idy o’ losin’ the bet, even after his squirrel arrived; and as he was the only man who had seen both the contestants, he had the whole country up in the air. Ol’ man Dort had made his squirrel run around the wheel four hours a day, pokin’ him up with a stick when he got lazy; an’ this gave Ben Butler sech a prodigious appetite that the ol’ man had to set up late at night to give him an extra meal. As the day o’ settlement came closer, the ol’ man tapered off on the exercise, an’ doubled up on the feed, until Ben Butler looked a full size larger, an’ us fellers who had our money on Eugene’s squirrel began to get shaky. If it had been just an even race, it would have been a fair deal; but to have to show a squirrel three times larger than Ben Butler seemed an impossibility.