“Well, poor chap, you do look as if you’d had a hard night of it — but there’s a bed here for you when you’ve had your breakfast. No, they ain’t dead, lad — we are sorry enough for that. You see we knew right where to put our hands on them, by your description; so we crept along on tiptoe till we got within fifteen feet of them — dark as a cellar that sumach path was — and just then I found I was going to sneeze.

It was the meanest kind of luck! I tried to keep it back, but no use — ’twas bound to come, and it did come! I was in the lead with my pistol raised, and when the sneeze started those scoundrels a-rustling to get out of the path, I sung out, ‘Fire boys!’ and blazed away at the place where the rustling was. So did the boys.