“‘You have three shies at it,’ I said. ‘I’ll furnish the axes, and every time that stream doesn’t knock you one hundred and fifty feet you get a new cigar. Want to buy in the game?’ I shambled him off to his wagon and dumped him in. “He laid low for his revenge, like the darned farmer he was, and meanwhile Hohankton was the cause of our undoing. Animals have a heap more sense about natural things than men has. Hank got in the way of following the boys over to the side of the creek. You know I used to undercut the bank while the boys worked the big stone out for me and loosened up the dirt here and there. They was as careless fellows as you’d see. Yet, at the same time, no man wants an eighty-foot bank of dirt on top of him, and so they’d be quite anxious in their minds for about five minutes before the slide came. “The first day Hank went over there he threw up his head as though he smelled something, straightened his tail, grunted loud and away he went. The boys near got pinched looking at him and laughing. When they went back, Hank went back, and the next time he blew his signal everybody departed. We were not such a swell-headed crowd we couldn’t learn a thing from an animal. Hank, old boy Rocks, was just as right as he was before, and after that he took up his position as Official Notifier and he never went wrong. The boys could work right along till they heard that squeal, and then do fast time to the creek. “We was proud enough of Hanky before, but now he had this actual stunt of his that we could prove to any or all lookers-on, our chests stuck out till the buttons popped off. Other fellows would drop in with stories of dogs that had done all the wonderful things that you have heard tell of, and cats that used to milk cows, and horses that could figure up to six times six, and all them lovely relations that gets to be natural history around the camps, and we could stand for it and say ‘Yes,’ just as if we believed it. “Then we’d remark we had a pig in camp; and wouldn’t say anything more until Hank signaled, and the visitor would begin to open his mouth to see everybody a-running, asking why. Then down come the bank! “Usually the stranger went and put up money that it wouldn’t happen again. After three times, though, he’d let go, scratching his head and meditating: ‘It’s so--I see it’s so, but how the blazes a pig knows more about the acts of gravitation than a white man--you tell me now?’ And we’d answer we weren’t going to tell him. Let him find out, same as we did. “Well, he’d admit in a kind of grudging way that that pig of ours was quite a curiosity. Yes, he’d admit it, in a sort of easy, offhand style, that old Hank was quite a curiosity, and we didn’t have to say anything.