CHAPTER VIBULL PEAK AND THE CRAWLING SHALE
“I’m sure calling this stuff just about the limit, aren’t you, Larry? Look at that stake you drove a few minutes ago—it’s half drowned already!”
On this particular morning Dick and Larry had been given a new job, namely, reëstablishing grade stakes ahead of the graders. Ordinarily, there would have been no need for this duplication of the work of the locating engineers; but the ground over which they were toilsomely making their way was anything but ordinary. It was a steep canyon slope composed of the most unstable material that is ever found in the Pandora box of the great Continental Divide; a smooth, sharply inclined plane of crawling shale pouring down like a broad river from the heights above in bits from the size of a fingernail to that of a silver half-dollar, and each bit as sleek and slippery as a watermelon seed.
Across this slope the right-of-way of the Nevada Short Line led, and it was interposing a very considerable barrier to the work. With every slightest disturbance the shale river would slither and slide, creeping slowly, to be sure, but with overwhelming persistence, burying the stakes of the survey, and affording no stable foothold for man or beast, or for the tripod of the surveying instrument.
“How we are ever going to dig a notch for our track through this stuff is more than I can tell,” Dick went on, once more trying to find a place where the transit would stand still long enough to enable him to get a sight through the telescope. “If anybody should ask, I’d say we’re up against it for fair, this time.”
It certainly looked that way. The shale slide was peculiar enough to be remarkable even in a region where singular geological formations were the rule rather than the exception. For the greater part of its length the canyon of the Tourmaline, up which the two railroads were racing, each straining every nerve to be the first to reach the newly opened gold district at the headwaters of the river, was a water-cut channel through the mountains with beetling cliffs or steep wooded slopes for its boundaries. But at this particular point some prehistoric convulsion of nature had opened a half-mile gap in the south wall, and through this broad gap, coming down from the high shoulder of Bull Peak, poured the vast river of disintegrated shale.
As yet, the Short Line grading force was barely at the beginning of its battle with the shale. The track had been pushed up to the western edge of the crawling cataract, and from its “take-off” on the final pair of rails a huge steam shovel was gnawing its way into the creeping obstruction. Beside the main track a short spur had been laid to accommodate a string of dump-cars which the great shovel was filling, a single scoop to the car-load.
“They’re not making an inch of headway down there, so far as I can see,” said Larry, indicating the busysteam shovel. “For every cubic yard they take out, another one slides in.”
Dick Maxwell glanced up at the slope on the opposite side of the gorge, where a high, trail-like line marked the path of the rival railroad.
“Those Overland Central engineers knew what they were about when they located their line away up there among the rocks,” he asserted. “They’re going to beat us, Larry. It’ll take us a month of Sundays to get across this river of snake scales—and then some.” Then, with a backward glance toward the stake they had just driven: “See there; what did I tell you!—that stake is buried, plumb out of sight!”
It was plainly apparent that the short surveying stakes they were using were no good at all in the shale, so they pushed on up-stream to the nearest river-fringing aspen grove, and with their belt axes cut longer ones. In driving these they found no bottom to the slippery mass; also, they remarked that every blow of the driving ax-head started fresh shale rivulets which wriggled and crept and crawled, and threatened never to come to rest.
It was early in the July day when they began the job of resetting the grade stakes across the short half-mile of the slide, and they had been hard at it all day, when with the sun dipping behind the western mountain, they came wading back to the temporary camp pitched just below the scene of the steam shovel digging. And for the day’s work of the big shovel there was little to show save a slight depression in the shale within the immediate swing of its steam-driven arm.
After supper there was a council of war held around the camp fire in front of the engineers’ tent, at which thetwo boys were interested listeners. After having made a careful examination of the new obstacle, the chief of construction had summoned his three assistants to discuss the best means of attacking it.
“It’s my notion that bulkheading is the only thing,” summed up Goldrick, who had been directing the steam-shovel operations during the day. “We’re not going to get anywhere at all unless we put in a retaining wall of some sort. The stuff slides in faster than we can take it out, and when it starts there doesn’t seem to be any end to it. The entire surface of the shale gets in motion as far up the slope as you can see.”
In this opinion, Jones and Hathaway, the other assistants, concurred, and after the matter had been thoroughly threshed out, the chief issued his orders.
“All right, Goldrick; bulkhead it if you have to. Time is the main object, rather than expense, just now. The O. C. is coming on fast with its track-laying, and if we’re delayed here very long, it’s a lost race for us. The pile-driver is at Pine Gulch. Better wire to-night and get it, and your bulkheading material, on the way. The thing to be done is to get across this place quickly. Drive it for every man in your gang and every pound of steam you can carry. I’m going down to Red Butte in the morning, but I’ll try to be back by Thursday. It’s up to you, Goldrick, shove it!”
For some time after they had gone to bed the two boys lay awake, talking about the new obstacle which was handicapping their force in the great race for the Little Ophir sweepstakes.
“If it isn’t one thing it’s another,” said Dick Maxwell gloomily. “First the O. C. tries to steal our right-of-way;then it floods us out and shoots rocks at us. And now, when we’ve earned a little more room to work in, here comes this avalanche of snake scales that we can’t cross. If anybody should ask me,I’dsay we’re hoodooed!”
“Oh, no; nothing like that,” was the quiet answer from the opposite cot “That’s just one of the things that makes the engineering fight the greatest game in the world. You’re always up against something that yells for the best there is in you to beat it.”
Silence for a few minutes, and then Dick said:
“Haven’t dug up another of your bright ideas—about this shale business, have you?”
“Not the ghost of one,” Larry laughed. “It’s a lot too big for me.”
“Will Mr. Goldrick’s bulkhead notion work out?”
“I sure hope it will. I don’t see anything else to try.”
“But you don’t believe it will work?”
“I’ve just been thinking,” was the doubtful reply. “You know how the stuff acted to-day when we were tramping back and forth over it; every little move made it slide just that much worse. I’ve been wondering if the jounce of the pile-driver isn’t going to keep it moving all the time. I wanted to say something about that while the talk was going on, only it wasn’t exactly a cub’s ‘put-in.’ Besides, I didn’t have anything better to suggest.”
“Well, you just let the little old think-mill keep on grinding,” Dick—respecting his chum’s powers of invention but still making a good-natured joke of them—chuckled mockingly. “If you can wrestle out the answer to the shale slide, maybe the company will fire Mr.Ackerman and give you his job.” And with that he turned over and went to sleep.
For quite some time after Dick’s regular breathing proved that he was making up for the day’s hard work, Larry lay awake with his hands clasped under his head, staring up into the darkness and grilling over the problem that was his to solve only because he was trying to learn all that he could in this, the most exciting as well as the most exhilarating summer vacation he had ever spent.
The general manager’s telegram congratulating him upon his success in helping to extricate the buried tunnel force at Tunnel Number Two—he was promising himself that in the years to come, after he had really made a success of himself, he would have that telegram framed and hung up where he could always see it—was a tremendous honor; but in a way it carried a lot of responsibility—or rather imposed a lot.
He had had a bit of the same sort of experience in school, where he had early set a pretty high mark as a “math. shark.” Having the mark, he had found that he had to live up to it, and he now had a sort of lurking suspicion that he was in for the same kind of a struggle. Mr. Maxwell had said he was making good, and he would be expected to go on making good. But this shale slide, which seemed to be puzzling even the competent and experienced engineers, was miles beyond any “boy” effort, and Larry was sensible enough to appreciate that. But yet—and yet again——
While he was lying there in the soft summer-night darkness grappling with the stubborn puzzle the sounds of the work battle driven by the night shift sorted themselves out for him; the rattle-and-clank and rapid-fireexhausts of the big steam shovel, the grumble of its swing aside, the slump and bang of its bucket-bottom as it dumped its burden into a car of the spoil train, followed by the slow gruntings of the train locomotive as it pushed another car up to receive the next shovelful. Punctuating the regular sequence of these near-by noises came the thunder of blast explosions, distance-softened; these, as Larry knew, being on the Overland Central grade, either above or below the camp.
He fell asleep at last, for his day’s work had been no less strenuous than Dick’s, but even in his dreams he was still figuring on the problem, which promptly proceeded to tangle itself inextricably with the shovel clamor and the distant muttering thunder of the blasting, and to become, in the dream wrestle, a part and parcel of the noises.
Turning out to an early breakfast, the two boys found the day shift already at work. Hastening up the track to see what the night shift had accomplished, they had a shock of discouragement. True, the big shovel hog had rooted its way a few feet farther into the slide, but apparently the disturbance it had set up in the surface of the shale had spread far and wide. The row of five-foot grade stakes they had driven the day before was now showing only a few inches of the top of the stakes, and another movement of the slide would bury them completely out of sight.
“Great Peter!” Dick exclaimed, with a little gasp, “if it’s going to do that every night, we’ll be rooting away at it for the next hundred years! Why, good goodness! there’s a full yard more of it around those stakes than there was when we drove them!”
As he spoke, the day men were preparing to haul the shovel out to make room for the pile-driver which had been brought up from Pine Gulch in the night. Presently the exchange was made, the guide-frame of the driver was raised, and the driving of the bulkhead posts was begun. At once the trouble that Larry had suggested in the talk with Dick developed. Each concussion of the heavy driver hammer falling upon the pile head brought down more of the shale, and in a very short time the small excavation so laboriously made by the shovel digging had entirely disappeared.
By noon a dozen of the piles had been driven, under conditions that were almost prohibitory, and men with hand shovels were working carefully to open a trench for the placing of the bulkhead planks behind the posts; digging cautiously and carefully so as not to bring down any more of the slippery deluge. By nightfall a creeping advance of some seventy-five feet or such a matter had been made; and when the night shift went on, the pile-driver had been moved ahead to begin another lap in the slow journey.
While they were eating supper in the camp mess tent Larry made a few figures on a bit of paper torn from his pocket note-book. When he finished he was shaking his head despairingly.
“That won’t do, Dick,” he said. “At a hundred and fifty feet of progress for a twenty-four-hour day we can count upon being held up here for a solid month. That means that the O. C. will beat us into Little Ophir, hands down.”
“And still you haven’t lassoed your bright idea?” Dick grinned across the table at him.
“Aw; you make me sort of tired with your everlasting jokes,” returned the maker of estimates; but, as on the night before, he went to bed soberly thoughtful.
The next morning there was more disappointment in store. The night shift, pressing the pile-driving, had had bad luck. Along in the small hours there had been an earthquake—at least, so the driver foreman averred—and immediately following it the slide had begun to crawl as a whole, continuing in motion for the remainder of the night. As a result, the bulkhead, and the pile-driver itself, had been slowly buried; and when the two boys got on the ground the steam shovel had been put in again to dig its companion machine out of the shale grave.
Reporting to Goldrick for duty, Larry and Dick were told that they might have the day off. There was nothing to be done until the pile-driver could be dug out, and there was no use in setting up grade stakes only to have them buried as fast as they were driven.
“Well, what shall we do with our holiday?” Dick asked, after they had strolled back to camp. “Mr. Bob Goldrick seems a whole lot peeved this morning—for which you can’t blame him a little bit—and I guess he doesn’t want us around under foot.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Larry, falling back upon a phrase which was growing to be a habit with him. “I believe I’d like to see where this slide starts—where it’s all coming from, I mean.”
“Gee!” Dick interposed; “that would mean climbing Bull Peak!”
“Well, what of it? We’ve got the day for it, if we want to take it.”
“All right,” said Dick with a little sigh which meant that he knew full well what he was in for on a day’s hike with the stubborn one who never turned back until he had accomplished his purpose. “Anything you say. But we’re going to need a balloon or an aeroplane before we ever see the top of old Bull.”
Limiting themselves to a single haversack in which to carry a noon-day lunch; to the haversack and Dick’s field-glass; they struck out without telling anybody where they were going. Since it was impossible to make the climb on the canyon-facing side of the mountain, they made a long detour, zigzagging back and forth through the forests on the western slope of the peak, and stopping now and then as they gained altitude to catch their breath and to admire the magnificent view which opened out in wider and still wider spreadings as they ascended.
At noon they had reached the timber line, which, at this point, was as abruptly marked as if the bald heights above it had been cleared by human hands. As they had prefigured and planned to do, they came out of the forest well to the westward of the slide head; but now they had only to circle the peak, without climbing any higher.
After eating the luncheon which the camp cook had put up for them they began the circling. A mile or more of it brought them to a narrow terrace or bench, with the higher heights, in the gulches of which some of last year’s snow still remained, stretching away above them.
It was in this circumnavigating process that they came upon a thing to prove that they were not the first climbers to scale the rugged heights of Bull Peak. The proofwas a broken clay tobacco pipe, black from much use, and it was Dick who saw it and picked it up.
“One of Robinson Crusoe’s ‘footprints’,” he laughed. “Where there is a pipe, there must have been a man to smoke it. Puzzle picture: find the man. Who was he, and what was he doing away up here?”
“You tell me that, if you can,” said Larry. Then: “Great minds run in the same ruts, you know. Maybe he was like us—some fellow who wanted to see where the shale slide starts from. Which brings on more talk: we ought to be getting somewhere near the thing by this time. Let’s hike to the top of that cliff and see if it won’t give us a better lookout.”
Climbing to the summit of a crag a little farther around to the eastward, they presently found themselves directly above that which they had come to see. Spreading downward from the foot of the cliff ran the mile-long slide; and at the bottom of it, so far away that the big machine looked like a child’s toy, they could make out the steam shovel, the alternating bursts of steam from its exhaust pipe serving to identify it.
Further investigation showed them the cause of the slide. The cliff upon which they were standing had for its underpinning a vast bed of the shale which had doubtless been disintegrating and shelling off under the action of the weather for centuries in the past.
“Heavens to Betsy!” Dick exclaimed, peering down at the huge shale ledge, “there’s enough of it there to keep us digging our right-of-way for the next hundred years!”
“There sure is, if we don’t come up here and stop it,” Larry put in.
“Stop it? Why, man alive, what are you raving about? How are you going to stop a snake-scale flood like that?”
Larry did not reply. He had borrowed Dick’s field-glass and was intently scrutinizing the surface of the slide. Getting no answer from his companion, Dick broke out impatiently.
“What are you looking at?”
“I was just wondering what made those big dents in the surface down there: you can see them without the glass—down by that big rock that makes a sort of island in the slide—over a little to the left of the rock.”
Dick followed directions and saw.
“Sort of funny,” he remarked. “Looks as if there’d been a slip there; or rather three or four of them.”
Larry buttoned his coat.
“I’m going to swing down yonder and get a little closer peek at those places. Want to risk it with me?”
“Surest thing you ever heard of,” was the instant rejoinder; and together they made a roundabout and rather hazardous descent of the cliff and so came at its shale-bed foot.
In the momentary halt Larry looked the outcropping mass of shale over with an appraisive eye.
“Yep,” he said, as if he were letting his thought slip into spoken words without realizing it, “I believe it can be done.”
“Believe what can be done?” Dick demanded.
“Stopping the sun-dance of the snake-scales,” Larry responded shortly; but he did not explain what he meant as they eased themselves down to the big rock whichmarked the location of the curious dents in the shale surface.
The “dents” grew in size as they approached them; so much, indeed, as to become good-sized hollows when they looked down upon them from the top of the island boulder. Out of one of them a thin rivulet of the shale was trickling, and they could trace its creeping, crawling course a long way down the slope. Suddenly Larry said: “Take off your coat, Dick,” and he set the example by quickly stripping his own. “Now your belt,” and again he set the example in his own person.
Dickie Maxwell obeyed, but not without question.
“Now what on top of earth is biting you this time?” he queried.
“I’ll show you in a minute,” Larry replied.
With workmanlike deftness he hooked the two belts together by their buckles and then knotted the free end of each to a sleeve of a coat. The result was a clumsy substitute for a life-line long enough to reach from the summit of the island rock to a point some distance out in the shale stream.
“Now, then; hang on and anchor me,” was the next order; and when Dick had made a snubbing post of himself,Larry went over the edge of the rock andby keeping hold of the makeshift life-lineworked his waycautiouslyout to one of the depressions. There he stooped, picked up something, and then came back as he had gone, edging himself along in a way to disturb the sliding stuff as little as possible, and taking a hand from Dick to help him climb back to the top of the boulder-island.
Larry went over the edge of the rock ... and worked his way out to one of the depressions
Larry went over the edge of the rock ... and worked his way out to one of the depressions
Larry went over the edge of the rock ... and worked his way out to one of the depressions
“Good goodness! I should think you might tell afellow!” Dick fumed. But all Larry had to show for the little acrobatic stunt was a small scrap of yellow wrapping paper that looked as if it had been soaked in grease.
“Shucks!” snorted the anchor-man, “was that all you went down after?”
Larry held out the scrap of paper.
“All?—don’t you see what this is, Dick?”
Dick took the bit of paper and examined it.
“Whew!” he breathed; “I guess I do! It’s—it’s part of the cover of a dynamite cartridge!”
This admission brought on still more talk, and a lot of it, at that.
“Now we know what brought down Jim Haskins’s ‘earthquake’ last night,” Dick summed up. “Somebody stuck a few dynamite cartridges into this stuff up here and fired ’em.And the dynamite did just what it was meant to do!”
Larry made no comment upon the very evident piece of lawless sabotage or the manner of its accomplishment. His brain was busy with something more important.
“They say curiosity killed the cat, but this is one time when it is going to save the cat’s life,” he announced, struggling into his coat. “If we hadn’t climbed up here out of sheer fool curiosity——”
“‘We’!” Dick protested; “you, you mean. I’d never have thought of it in a thousand years!”
“Never mind who thought of it first: we’re here, both of us, and we know what’s been done, and what will, most likely, be done again. It’s our job to find out who’s doing it, and to spike his gun for him. That old claypipe you found is the clue. Let’s get busy and follow it up.”
Accordingly, they made the long circuit again and went back to the place where the pipe had been found, where they became trailers, working about in widening circles until, well along toward evening, they made the hoped-for discovery.
At the foot of a low cliff, only a few hundred yards from the head of the shale slide they saw a weather-worn army tent pitched under the cliff shelter, and a shallow, tunnel-like opening in the cliff itself which appeared to be either a prospect hole or a mine. In front of the tent there was a small camp fire, and over the fire two rough-looking men were cooking their evening meal.
At the sight Larry grabbed Dick and dragged him back behind a concealing shoulder of the rock.
“We’ve got ’em!” he whispered. “We’ve covered the ground well enough to be sure that there isn’t anybody else on this whole mountain side.”
“But we can’t be sure that they’re the ones that are doing the dynamiting,” Dick put in.
“We are going to be sure of it before we quit,” said Larry grimly; “and it’s going to cost us something, at that.”
The cost was the loss of a supper, and a vigil that tried them both to the limit. Creeping cautiously away from the vicinity of the tent and the mine opening, they worked their way back to the top of the cliff overlooking the slide. There they stretched themselves out on the brink to begin their vigil. Slowly the darkness crept up from the distant canyon, rising like a murky tide to theclearer heights, and one by one the stars came out to blaze in the black bowl of the heavens larger and nearer than either of the watchers had ever seen them before.
With the coming of night a cold wind swept down from the snow-gulch heights behind and above them, and they were soon turning up their coat collars and shivering. At their altitude, which, they estimated, could not be less than ten thousand feet, the July nights are cold with a penetrating chill that not even the dry air can temper.
“M-m-my g-gracious!” mumbled Dick, trying to hold his chattering teeth still long enough to get the words out, “th-this is something f-fierce, I’ll tell the wo-world! I’d give a d-dollar if I could get up and run around in ci-circles for a lil-little while. Whoosh! but it’s cold!”
“Shut up!” Larry growled. “If they should be coming they might hear you. Keep those rattling teeth of yours quiet. They make more noise than an automobile gear.”
“But I’m cold!” Dick protested.
“So am I, but I’m not beefing about it. It’s all in the day’s work.”
As nearly as they could judge it was about two hours after they began to freeze solid when the starlight showed them two figures making their way silently along the foot of the cliff, and, a little later, creeping down the edge of the slide to the island boulder. What the two figures did was, of course, invisible from the cliff top; but after a wait of perhaps fifteen minutes two dull explosions, followed by a hissing sound as of a thousand suddenly disturbed snakes, told them that another assisted avalanche of the crawling shale was on its waydown toward the twinkling electrics marking the night shift’s attack on the stubborn obstacle.
“Quick, now!” Larry gritted. “They’re coming up, and we must make sure that they’re the same two we saw cooking their supper at that mine hole!”
The trailing of the pair, since the boys were reasonably certain of the route they would take, was hazardous only because of the darkness and the need for doing it noiselessly. None the less, the thing was done, and done right. Not for a single moment did they lose sight of the dodging figures until they saw them enter the tent at the mine mouth.
“The job’s done,” was Larry’s comment, when the weathered tent began to glow with the light of a candle to advertise its occupancy. “Now for the long down-hill hike in the dark.”
That, in itself, was a stiffish undertaking, eating up time most voraciously, as all mountain climbers caught out after nightfall in the Rockies will be willing to testify. The detour they were obliged to make could not have measured less than four wearisome miles, and what with feeling their way and having to head gulches and scramble down precipices in blackness that was almost Egyptian, it was fully midnight before they reached camp.
As it turned out, the slowly crawling dynamited avalanche had beaten them only by a half-hour or so; and as they tramped in, hungry and muscle-sore, the chief engineer, Goldrick, and Jones, the second assistant, were just returning from the scene of the latest overwhelming; a shale flood that had once more buried the pile-driver and the steam shovel.
Most naturally it didn’t take the boys long to tell their story, and at its close the chief’s comment was brief and to the point.
“It is another O. C. trick to delay us,” he asserted. “I didn’t think that Orrin Grissby, their chief, would get down to anything as mean and criminal as that! Those two men are doubtless on his pay-roll, and they are pretending to be working a mine as a blind, in case anybody should happen to run across them up yonder.”
“Well,” said Jones, who was a young man with a square jaw and the cold gray eye of a fighter, “do we take it lying down?”
“Not by any manner of means!” snapped the chief. “You pick out a half dozen of your huskies that you can depend on and go up after those sham miners. If these boys found their way down in the dark, you can find your way up. Bring those fellows in and we’ll swear out a warrant for them. They’ll go to jail, if there’s any law left in the Timanyoni!”
Being a young man of swift action and few words, Jones quickly disappeared to put the order into effect. It was then that young Goldrick spoke up.
“That stops one of the exciting causes; but I suppose we’ll always be having trouble with this slide, from what the boys say. That shale cliff up there will keep on shedding from now till doomsday.”
It was just here that Dick Maxwell, tired and sleepy as he was, put in another word.
“Larry, here, says it can be stopped,” he said, “but he didn’t tell me how.”
“What is that?” asked the chief quickly. “Another idea of yours, Donovan?”
Larry flushed a bit under the pallor of his weariness.
“It’s nothing that anybody wouldn’t have thought of, if they had seen what we did,” he explained modestly. “There is a big ledge of the shale at the top of the slide, as Dick has told you, and I guess it’s been weathering and crumbling for hundreds of years. What I thought of was this: if we could get up there some way with men and material and a cement-gun, a coating of cement could be shot all over the face of the ledge and so sort of seal it up and keep it from weathering any more.”
The grave-eyed chief exchanged glances with Goldrick. Then he said:
“I thought you were a machinist’s helper, and the like, Larry, before you came on this job. What do you know about cement work and cement-guns?”
Larry flushed again.
“It just happened,” he stammered. “Last summer, when the Brewster Electric Power and Light Company had trouble with that crumbling rock above their dam, I went out there one day and saw them shooting a new surface on it with a cement-gun. And the surface has stood and kept it from crumbling any more.”
Again there was a little silence in the chief’s tent. At the end of it Mr. Ackerman said:
“I guess you boys are pretty hungry—going without your supper. Trot down to the cook shack and get outside of anything you can find ready-made.”
After they were gone he turned to Goldrick with a slow smile.
“It’s interesting, Goldrick, to notice what odd things jump up in the woods when you haven’t your gun along,” he remarked. “When Mr. Maxwell told me he wasgoing to load these two youngsters on me for the summer—and in this hot fight which I knew well enough was coming—I came mighty near asking him not to. It is rather lucky for us that I didn’t, don’t you think?”
“Rather,” said Goldrick; “I’m saying it, and but for that red-headed boy I might not be here to say it.”
“Yes,” the chief nodded; “that tunnel business was fine. But now to-day; I grant you that it was nothing but sheer boy-curiosity that took those two fellows up on Bull Peak; but there you are—none of the rest of us had the boy-curiosity. And that Donovan lad, with his, ‘it just happened’: if he doesn’t make good all the way along, it won’t be because he doesn’t keep his eyes open and his wits on edge. There are times when he seems years older than he claims to be.”
It was at this precise moment that Larry, out in the cook shack, had just pried open a can of baked beans for Dick and another for himself. And what he was saying sufficiently proved his right and title still to be called a boy.
“Gee-whoosh, Dick!—did you ever taste anything so good as these beans in all your born days? My land! I believe I could eat until I’m like the toad-frog that wanted to swell himself up and be as big as an ox!”