[Illustration: Bunch Jefferson--All to the Good and Two to Carry.]

"Ah! my friend from the bush!" he exclaimed; "are you in town to
buy imitation coal, or is it to get a derrick and hoist your home
affairs away from my property? Why don't you take a tumble, John,
and let go?"

"Bunch," I said, "believe me, this is the crudest game of
freeze-out I ever sat in. My throat is sore from singing, 'Father,
dear father, come home with me now!' and every move I make nets me
a new ornamentation on my neck. Why didn't I tell the good wife
that the ponies put the crimp in my pocketbook instead of crawling
into this chasm of prevarication and trouble?"

"You can search me!" Bunch answered, thoughtfully.

"And that phony wire you sent me yesterday almost gave me a
plexus," I said bitterly. "Why did you frame up one of those
when-we-were-twenty-one dispatches from the front? It sounded like
a love song from Willie Hayface of Cohoes, after his first day on
Broadway. Didn't you know that my wife was liable to open that
queer fellow and put me on the toasting fork?"

Bunch blinked his eyes solemnly, but when I told him all about the
trouble his telegram had caused he simply rose up on his hind legs
and laughed me to a sit down.

"Well," he gasped after a long fit of cackling; "sister did intend
going out to Jiggersville and the only way I could stop her was to