"The mules being hot and nervous, he sent them all to the loco patch
instanter. They began to plunge and turn and back and snarl. Before
you could say 'Craps! you lose,' them shave-tails was giving the
grandest exhibition of animal idiocy in the Territory, barring the
teamster. He follered their trail to the madhouse, yanking the
mouths out of them, cruel and vicious.

"Now, one mule can cause a heap of tribulation, and six mules can
break a man's heart, but there wasn't no excuse for that driver to
stand up on his hind legs, close his eyes, and throw thirty foot of
lash into that plunging buckin', white-eyed mess. When he did it,
all the little words inside of me began to foam and fizzle like
sedlitz; out they came, biting, in mouthfuls, and streams, and
squirts, backwards, sideways, and through my nose.

"'Here! you infernal half-spiled, dog-robbing walloper,' I says; 'you
don't know enough to drive puddle ducks to a pond. You quit heaving
that quirt or I'll harm you past healing.'

"He turned his head and grit out something through his teeth that
stimulated my circulation. I skipped over the wheels and put my left
onto his neck, fingering the keys on his blow-pipe like a flute.
Then I give him a toss and gathered up the lines. Say! it was like
the smell of grease-paint to an actor man for me to feel the ribbons
again, and them mules knew they had a chairman who savvied 'em too,
and had mule talk pat, from soda to hock.

"I just intimated things over them with that whip, and talked to them
like they was my own flesh and blood. I starts at the worst words