When her course crossed that of Billybedam, she was traveling an unfrequented path on the outskirts of the settlement, and, with little need for caution, she walked rapidly, giving out as she moved a faint, hollow sound like the subdued tones of a xylophone. She hailed the bibulous one as a regular and valued customer.
“Weh you gwine, bubbuh?”
“Wuh you got? I gwine ’tell I fin’um.”
“I got ’nuf.”
“Gimme uh pint;” and he held out half a dollar.
“Gimme seb’nty fi’ cent. Dishyuh t’ing hol’ mo’n uh pint.”
“Wuh kinduh t’ing dat? Lemme shum.”
“Yuh him,” and Miss Wineglass fumbled under her skirt and, from a marvelously durable and comprehensive pair of bloomers made of two cottonseed meal sacks sewed together at the top, produced a gourd holding about three half-pints, and passed it over. The gourd was bottle-shaped and cob-stoppered and ingeniously laced about with hickory bark, as flasks of Chianti are wrapped with flags. The knocking together of half a dozen of these gourds, tied around her waist and suspended within her bloomers, had produced the xylophone music. The money paid, they parted.
Billybedam went his ways. Whatever the nature of the nepenthe the “Fus’ X” extracted from the calabash, it so ’whelmed his wits that oblivion lurked in the bottom of the gourd and overcame him. He fell among thieves, who stripped him of a new shirt he wore and left him, in his trousers only, by the roadside, where a local constable found him next morning and haled him before the magistrate for being inadequately clothed on the public highway.
“What have you to say for yourself?”