outside of a little suthin' now, if only to prop up a kind of innard
sinkin' that takes me. Ye ken tell me the news at supper."

Later, however, when Mr. Sharpe had quitted his forge for the night and,
seated at his domestic board, was, with a dismal presentiment of future
indigestion, voraciously absorbing his favorite meal of hot saleratus
biscuits swimming in butter, he had apparently forgotten his curiosity
concerning Mainwaring and settled himself to a complaining chronicle of
the day's mishaps. "Nat'rally, havin' an extra lot o' work on hand and
no time for foolin', what does that ornery Richelieu get up and do this
mornin'? Ye know them ridiklus specimens that he's been chippin' outer
that ledge that the yearth slipped from down the run, and litterin' up
the whole shanty with 'em. Well, darn my skin! if he didn't run a heap
of 'em, mixed up with coal, unbeknowned to me, in the forge, to make
what he called a 'fire essay' of 'em. Nat'rally, I couldn't get a
blessed iron hot, and didn't know what had gone of the fire, or the coal
either, for two hours, till I stopped work and raked out the coal. That
comes from his hangin' round that saw-mill in the woods, and listenin'
to Bradley's high-falutin' talk about rocks and strata and sich."

"But Bradley don't go a cent on minin', Pop," said Minty. "He sez the
woods is good enough for him; and there's millions to be made when the
railroad comes along, and timber's wanted."

"But until then he's got to keep hisself, to pay wages, and keep the
mill runnin'. Onless it's, ez Bixby says, that he hopes to get that
Englishman to rope in some o' them 'Frisco friends of his to take a
hand. Ye didn't have any o' that kind o' talk, did ye?"

"No; not THAT kind o' talk," said Minty.