But he did escape. One open-handed buffet sent him reeling into and through some wayside bushes. He sat on his haunches on the other side a moment like a jack-rabbit and surveyed the stirring scene, and then made for higher ground. At the end of an enervating sixty-days' sentence in the county jail--his seventeenth summer "on the bricks" for the same old bibulous cause; second offence, and no money left to pay the fine--Tommy did not feel fit for the fray. He sat on a bowlder at the top of the rise for a little while and gazed down on them--the hundred men of "Britt's Busters," bound in for the winter cutting on Umcolcus waters. They were fighting aimlessly, "mixing it up" without any special vindictiveness, and Tommy, an expert in inebriety, sagely concluded that they were too drunk to furnish amusement. So he rolled over the bowlder and nestled down to ease his headache, knowing, as a teamster should know, that Britt's tote wagons were to hold up at the Pugwash for a half-hour's rest and bait. For that matter, a fight at the Pugwash was no novel incident--not for Tommy Eye, at least, veteran of many a woods campaign. The hang-up at the hill is a teamster's rule as ancient as the tote road. And the fight of the ingoing crew is as regular as the halt. All the way from the end of the railroad the men have been crowded on the wagons, with nothing to do but express personal differences of opinion. Every other man is a stranger to his neighbor, for employment offices do not make a specialty of introductions. As the principal matter of argument on the tote wagons is which is the best man, the Pugwash Hill wait, where there is soft ground and elbow-room, makes a most inviting opportunity to settle disputes and establish an _entente cordiale_ that will last through all the winter. Two other men--two men who had been on the outskirts of the fray from its beginning--came leisurely up the hill, and sat down on the bowlder behind which was couched Tommy Eye. One was the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt; the other was Colin MacLeod. The Honorable Pulaski tucked the end of a big cigar into the opening in his bristly gray beard where his mouth was hidden, and lighted it. As an after-thought he offered one to MacLeod. The young man, his elbows on his knees, his flushed face turned aside, shook his head sullenly. "Well, you're having a run of cuss-foolishness that even our champion fool, Tommy Eye himself, couldn't match," snorted the old man, rolling his tongue around his cigar. Tommy, behind the rock, tipped one ear up out of the moss. "Here you go pouncing into that car to-day, where my new time-keeper was, and go to picking a fuss with him, and--" "He was the one that started it, Mr. Britt," said the boss, in the dull monotone of one who has said the same thing many times before.