Linton peered down over the edge of the log. "It's your opinion I'm a what?" he inquired, with vicious calmness. "Nothing. It's no use to tell you. Now then, lift, bite, leg--Why don't you lift?" "I AM lifting. Leggo your end!" Mr. Linton tugged violently, but the saw came up slowly. It rose and fell several times, but with the same feeling of dead weight attached to it. Tom wiped the sweat out of his eyes and once again in a stormy voice he addressed his partner: "If you don't get off them handles I'll take a stick and knock you off. What you grinnin' at?" "Why, she's stuck, that's all. Drive your wedge--" Jerry's words ended in an agonized yelp; he began to paw blindly. "You did that a-purpose." "Did what?" "Kicked sawdust in my eyes. I saw you!" Mr. Linton's voice when he spoke held that same sinister note of restrained ferocity which had characterized it heretofore. "When I start kicking I won't kick sawdust into your eyes! I'll kick your eyes into that sawdust. That's what I'll do. I'll stomp 'em out like a pair of grapes." "You try it! You try anything with me," Jerry chattered, in a simian frenzy. "You've got a bad reputation at home; you're a malo hombre--a side-winder, you are, and your bite is certain death. That's what they say. Well, ever see a Mexican hog eat a rattler? That's me--wild hog!" "'Wild hog.' What's wild about you?" sneered the other. "You picked the right animal but the wrong variety. Any kind of a hog makes a bad partner." For a time the work proceeded in silence, then the latter speaker resumed: "You said I was a dam' something or other. What was it?" The object of this inquiry maintained an offensive, nay an insulting, silence. "A what?" Linton persisted. Quirk looked up through his mask of sawdust. "If you're gettin' tired again why don't you say so? I'll wait while you rest." He opened his eyes in apparent astonishment, then he cried: "Hello! Why, it's rainin'." "It ain't raining," Tom declared. "Must be--your face is wet." Once more the speaker cackled shrilly in a manner intended to be mirthful, but which was in reality insulting beyond human endurance. "I never saw moisture on your brow, Tom, except when it rained or when you set too close to a fire." "What was it you wanted to call me and was scared to?" Mr. Linton urged, venomously. "A dam' what?" "Oh, I forget the precise epithet I had in mind. But a new one rises to my lips 'most every minute. I think I aimed to call you a dam' old fool. Something like that." Slowly, carefully, Mr. Linton descended from the scaffold, leaving the whip-saw in its place. He was shaking with rage, with weakness, and with fatigue. "'Old'? ME old? I'm a fool, I admit, or I wouldn't have lugged your loads and done your work the way I have. But, you see, I'm strong and vigorous and I felt sorry for a tottering wreck like you--" "'Lugged MY loads'?" snorted the smaller man. "ME a wreck? My Gawd!"