Tommy twisted his face into a prodigious wink, jabbed a thumb over his shoulder towards the store door, and gazed archly around at the circle of faces. "He cut the boss out with the Ide girl!" He whispered this hoarsely. The listeners looked at the door where Wade and the girl had disappeared, and then stared at one another. They had viewed the arrival of the stage with the dull lethargy of the hopelessly stranded. Now they displayed a reviving interest in life. "And that was all he done to him--step on his foot?" demanded a thin man, impatiently twitching the stubs of two arms, off at the elbows. "Old P'laski got in!" said Tommy, with meaning. "Used his old elbows for pick-holes and fended Colin off." "It will git him, though!" said another. He had shapeless stumps of legs encased in boots like exaggerated whip-sockets. "You bet it will git him!" agreed McCrackin. Rodburd Ide, busy, chatty, accommodating little man, trotted out of the store at this instant with a handful of mail to distribute among his crippled patrons. "That's what the river boys call this crowd here," he said, over his shoulder, to Wade, who followed him. "The 'It-'ll-git-ye Club.' I guess It _will_ get ye some time up in this section! Here's the last one, Mr. Wade. Aholiah Belmore--that's the man with the hand done up. Shingle-saw took half his fin. Well, 'Liah, don't mind! No one ever saw a whole shingle-sawyer. It's lucky it wasn't a snub-line that got ye. There's what a snub-line can do, Mr. Wade." He pointed to the armless man and to the man with the shapeless legs. "All done at the same time--bight took 'em and wound 'em round the snub-post." "And it's a pity it wa'n't our necks instead of our legs and arms," growled one of the men--"trimmed like a saw-log and no good to nobody!" "Never say die--never say die!" chirruped the jovial "Mayor of Castonia." He threw back his head in his favorite attitude, thrust out his gray chin beard and tapped his pencil cheerily against the obtrusive false teeth showing under his smoothly shaven upper lip. "Your subscription-papers are growing right along, boys. The first thing you know you'll have enough to buy artificial arms and legs, such as we were looking at in the advertisements the other day. It beats all what they can make nowadays--teeth, arms, legs, and everything." "They can't make new heads, can they?" inquired Tommy Eye, whose mien was that of a man who had something important to impart and was casting about for a way to do it gracefully. "Who needs a new head around here?" smilingly inquired the "mayor."