owner and he held the man's attention even after he knew that the great Jim Harris waited.
Then the proprietor broke away and Joe leaned back and puffed while Harris took a handful of cigars from the box. Silence.
"An' you never heerd tell 'bout Paul's mule team?" Joe asked Taylor.
"Never!"
Joe shook his head and clicked his tongue. "My Lord, you're igerent," he said and hitched about to face Taylor, and see Harris. He waited a moment before he commenced to talk, prefacing his tale by a moment of suspense, as is the way with the best spinners of yarns. Harris, biting off the end of his cigar, watched. There had been no unfriendly stare from Black Joe this time; there seemed to be no barrier between the woodsman and any who might be within earshot. For months Jim Harris had awaited such a moment.
He looked down the street. The last of the supervisors was disappearing within the court house. Had Joe waited another instant Jim might have gone on to join them, but Joe did not wait. He commenced to talk, slowly, deliberately. He told his story as the Bunion stories have been told for two generations in the Lake States. Those about him were schooled listeners; they knew when to inject the questions that led him into the byways of Bunion classics, knew when to laugh, when to repress their mirth until the point of the narrative should be completed.
And Jim Harris waited and listened, wanting to go, putting aside his caution from moment to moment because Black Joe was recounting the adventures of this mythical
