Without warning he sat down so hard and so suddenly that his feet flew up and kicked the table underneath.
"Leggo!" he gurgled.
For answer Bertha took another twist around the stout neck-band of his orange undergarment.
"I'll learn you rough-necks some manners!" she panted. "I'll git the respect that's comin' to a lady if I have to clean out this here camp!"
"You quit, now!" He rolled a pair of wild, beseeching eyes around the table. "Somebudy take her off!"
"Coward--to fight a woman!" She fell back with a section of James's shirt in one hand, with the other reaching for his hair.
He clapped the crook of his elbow over his ear and started to slide under the table when the special Providence that looks after Swedes intervened. A long, plump, shining bull-snake took that particular moment to slip off one of the log beams and bounce on the bride's head.
She threw herself on Jennings emitting sounds like forty catamounts tied in a bag. The flying crew jammed in the doorway, burst through and never stopped to look behind until they were well outside.
"Hy-sterics," said the carpenter who was married--"she's took a fit."
"Hydrophoby--she must a bit herself!" Porcupine Jim was vigorously massaging his neck.
The bride was sitting on the floor beating her heels, when Bruce put his head in the door cautiously: "If there's anything I can do--"
Bertha renewed her screams at sight of him.
"They is--" she shrieked--"Git out!"
"You don't want to go near 'em when they're in a tantrum," advised the carpenter in an experienced tone. "But that's about the hardest one I ever see."
Jennings, staggering manfully under his burden, bore the hysterical Amazon to her tent and it remained for Bruce to do her work.
"That's a devil of a job for a General Manager," commented John Johnson sympathetically, as he stood in the doorway watching Bruce, with his sleeves rolled up, scraping assiduously at the bottom of a frying-pan.
Bruce smiled grimly but made no reply. He had been thinking the same thing himself.
Bruce often had watched an ant trying to move a bread-crumb many times its size, pushing with all its feet braced, rushing it with its head, backing off and considering and going at it again. Failing, running frantically around in front to drag and pull and tug. Trying it this way and that, stopping to rest for an instant then tackling it in fresh frenzy--and getting nowhere, until, out of pity, he gave it a lift.
Bruce felt that this power-plant was his bread-crumb, and tug and push and struggle as he would he could not make it budge. The thought, too, was becoming a conviction that Jennings, who should have helped him push, was riding on the other side.