first it filled Will with despair that set me laughing at him. Then
Will threw seriousness to the winds and laughed too, so that the
spell of impending evil, caused as much as anything by forced separation
from Monty, was broken.

But it did better than put us in rising spirits. It convinced the
Armenians! That foolish jargon, picked up from comic papers and
the penny dreadfuls, convince more firmly than any written proof
the products of the mission schools, whose one ambition was to be
American themselves, and whose one pathetic peak of humor was the
occasional glimpse of United States slang dropped for their edification
by missionary teachers!

"By jimminy!" remarked an Armenian near me.

"Gosh-all-hemlocks!" said another.

Thenceforward nothing undermined their faith in us. Plenty of amused
repudiation was very soon forthcoming from another source, but it
passed over their heads. Fred and I, because we used fool expressions
without relation to the context or proportion, were established as
the genuine article; Will, perhaps a rather doubtful quantity with
his conservative grammar and quiet speech, was accepted for our sakes.
They took an arm on either side of us to help us up the hill, and
in proof of heart-to-heart esteem shouted "Oopsidaisy!" when we stumbled
in the pitchy dark. When we were brought to a stand at last by a
snarled challenge and the click of rifles overhead, they answered
with the chorus of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, a classic that ought to have
died an unnatural death almost a quarter of a century before.