"You did that pretty neat, lad," said the teamster cheerfully. "I was afraid you would try to jump. You've shore got pluck."
Charley grinned. "It was simply a bad case of being too scared to move. Well, let's climb on the wagon and get back to camp. Say," he continued, as the teamster whipped up the mules he had harnessed up while talking, "do you have many of those moccasins out here?"
"Not many right here," grinned the driver, "but on these strips of pine lands there is not supposed to be any. I suppose our crew kills from twenty to twenty-five a week. Sometimes we kill them all curled up nice and comfortable in our bunks. But, pshaw! that ain't nothing to the day it will be five or ten miles farther out. I drove out there once and it's a sure bet the wheels and mules' hoofs killed over a hundred going and coming."
"Whew!" Charley whistled, "that's not very pleasant to hear, but, here we are at camp, and I've been too excited over this trip to ask your name."
"It's Jim Canody--'Languid Jim' they generally call me," grinned the teamster.
"You can go back to work, then, Jim," said Charley. "Do your best, and I'll have a good man to help you soon. Drive in by the cook tent and I'll jump off there."
"Well, Chris," he inquired, "how are you getting on?"
The little negro grinned. "Dis ain't going to be no cinch, Massa Charles," he said. "Cooking and cleaning up for twenty-five men is goin' to be a mighty big job for one small nigger. 'Sides, if you work a night crew hit means a whole lot more work putting up midnight lunches. Dat's a lot of extra work."
"I see you have got to have an assistant," Charley agreed.
"Dat's so," acquiesced Chris, "but he's going to be mah helper, and I want to pick him out."
"Give me a description of the kind of help you want, and I'll try to get it," Charley grinned.
Chris reflected. "I'd like a nigger jes' 'bout my size," he said musingly. "'Cause he won't be noaccount 'less I can make him do as I tell him. I'd like him to be a yellar nigger, too. 'Cause a yellar negro is much more timid, and shows de dirt much quicker dan a coal-black nigger. Hit's a lot moah easy to keep him clean. Dis nigger don't want no noaccount nigger trifling around dat he can't lick."