"All right," answered Charley. "But they was scared half to death yesterday when you an' them fellers came tearin' in, 'specially when you started shooting. You was awful drunk, wasn't you?"
"I don't remember much about it," confessed Johnny, "so I reckon mebby I was. We all got lost an' had to sleep out in th' brush all night. We was after th' coyote what kidnapped th' Doc, but we couldn't find him."
Dailey forgot to continue filling the list. He was holding a sack of sugar in his hand and drinking in every word. Johnny turned to him.
"Say, Ben," he said, "did I ever tell you th' story about Damsight?"
"You never did," answered the storekeeper, "not if my mem'ry ain't playin' me false again."
"It was scandalous," began Johnny, drumming with fingers on the butt of a gun. "There was a bunch of hoss thieves fightin' a lone woman an' her crippled dad. An' what do you reckon th' men in Damsight did about it? Nothin'. Nothin' at all. They was so miserable, so coyote-livered, so scared to death that they didn't raise a finger. No, sir; there wasn't a man in th' town. They were just yellow dogs, runnin' around in men's clothes an' pertendin' they was humans—a lot of yellow dogs, an' not a cussed thing more."
Dailey bungled a knot, and swore under his breath.
"Things went on like that for quite a spell," continued Johnny, "then a big storm come up, an' one by one them fellers who didn't see th' error of their ways was struck by lightnin'. They never knowed what hit 'em. It was just like th' miracles I've heard sky pilots tell about. Some of 'em did see th' error of their ways in time. They had a hard time in th' storm, but they pulled out alive. There seems to be a moral to that story; there ain't no use tellin' a story like that if th' moral is left out. An' I reckon th' moral of this one is: A man might be able to dodge lots of trouble, 'specially when it ain't near him all th' time; but when he's livin' right next door to th' lightnin', he can't dodge that. What do you think about it, Charley?"
"Gee! That's like the things Peggy reads to me out of the Bible," he replied. "Only it wasn't lightning, but floods, and pestilences, and things like that. Why, once a whole ocean opened up right in the middle and let a lot of people walk across it, but when their enemies got halfway over, it closed up, smack! and they were all drowned."