“Then old Rip raised the rifle again, and there was a bad light in his old eyes. I can’t give you no idea of the satisfaction he expressed as he simply repeated the one word, ‘swim!’ “Brother Falk ground his teeth till the slivers flew; Rip moved his forefinger. That was enough. Into the mud, ker-sock! goes Falk, and the slime splashed a rod around. “All this time the Injun had been sort of quiet and sneering, but now he entered into the spirit of the thing. He capered like a school-boy. ‘Leelah ouashtay!’ He hollered. ‘Swim, fish! Kick, fat fish! Kick! Make hand go! Make head go! Make foot go! Wyupee! Chantay meatow leelah ouashtayda!’ Then he took to spanking Falk with the butt of the rifle. It was ‘a animated scene,’ as the poet says. You don’t often get a chance to see a two-hundred-and-twenty pound bully lying on his stomach in a mud-puddle swimming for dear life, so Steve and me made the most of it. “There was Falk hooking mud like a raving maniac--fountains and geysers and waterspouts of mud--while Rip pranced around him, war-whooping and yelling, and laying it on to him with the rifle-butt until each crack sounded like a pistol-shot. It seldom falls to the lot of man or boy to get such a thorough, heartfelt, soul-searching spanking as that ugly Dutchman received. My! I could feel every swat clear down to my toes, and there isn’t a shadow of doubt in my mind that Falk did too. “And that Injun looked so comical flying around in his high hat and specs and new clothes and canvas shoes! It was a sight to make a horse laugh. By and by Steve couldn’t stand it and he roared right out. That stopped the matinée. Rip looked up at us and grinned. ‘I got openers, this pot,’ says he, tapping the rifle. ‘Play nice game with friend--stand up, big, fat fish.’ “Well, we had a conniption fit when Falk made himself perpendicular. He _was_ a sight! If there ever a man lived whose name ought to be Mud, ’twas Falk. His hair was full of it; his face was gobbed with it, and drops of it fell off the end of his trickling Dutch _muss_-tash. To say nothing of them nice new clothes! Steve hollered, and I hollered, and the Injun hollered. We _more’n_ hollered; we rocked on our heels and laid back our ears and screeched--Falk looking from one to the other, oozing slough-juice at every vein, and wishing he had been buried young. “At last he kind of whimpers out, ‘Well, what are you going to do with me now?’ “‘Kika-lap!’ says Rip, ‘fly.’ “And Falk flew, like a little bird; up the side of the pot-hole, over the coulée and across the prairie--vanished, vamoosed, faded, gone for ever. He didn’t even stop to pack his clothes. The first train out was soon enough for him.