Red Saunders' Pets and Other CrittersPhillips, Henry Wallace
General
Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters
Phillips, Henry Wallace
Humorous stories
"When the Kid saw that miraculous result, his eyes bunged out; then he
took a long breath and wrecked the place. Aggy left at one that
morning for fear that worse might follow. He fetched this paper with
him to remind him that 'genius has its limitations,' he said. But he
didn't seem to learn anything by it. Next he took up engineering. He
hit a blame good job on Castle Creek. The people wanted to turn the
creek through a tunnel, so that they could work the bed, and at this
point it was rather an easy business. The stream made a 'U' about
three-quarters of a mile long, the bottom prong being at least a
hundred and fifty feet below the water-level on the top one--a smashing
good fall--so Aggy started in on the down side to bore the hole up.
Well, everything went lovely. He'd come around with his plans and
specifications twice a day, and draw his hundred once a week regular
for his great labours. At last, however, the shift-boss said they must
be getting pretty near water; he could hear it roar through the face of
the tunnel, he said. But Aggy told him not to be alarmed; he had it
all worked out, and they weren't within forty foot of breaking through."
[Illustration: He'd come around with his plans and specifications twice
a day]
"So at it they went again, as cheerful as could be, and the next news
they got, down comes the face, and they were being piped through four
hundred foot of black-dark tunnel, trying to guess what was up, bumping
and banging against the walls, and the whole of Castle Creek on top of
them. My, Chinamen weren't a circumstance. Aggy said they boiled out
of the lower end of the tunnel where he was standing so fast he
couldn't recognise them, and, as a matter of fact, three or four of 'em
were washed a mile down creek before they could make land. Aggy
gathered that it was time to move again, so he pulled back for Idaho.
There wasn't anybody really drowned, except old Tom Olley, a
cousin-Jack whose only amusement in life was to wear out his pants
laying low for cinches in the stud-poker game, and you couldn't rightly
say he was any loss to the community. So Aggy used to regret sometimes
that he hadn't stayed to face the music. They might have played horse
with him for a while, but 'twould soon have blown over--miners not
being revengeful by nature--and he was to have had an eighth interest,
besides his salary, if the thing was a success.
"But there was no good of crying over spilt milk, and us two went
prospecting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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