"I don't want to rub it in none," I says, "with you down and out, but from what I seen around this town to-night I guess you and your own gang got no GREAT objections to shooting from the dark yourselves."
"Why don't yo' shoot then?" he says. "It most suttinly is YO' turn now." And he never batted an eye.
"Bo," I says, "you got nerve. I LIKE you, Bo. I didn't shoot you, and I ain't going to. The feller that did has went. I'm going to get you out of this. Where you hurt?"
"Hip," he says, "but that ain't much. The thing that bothers me is this arm. It's done busted. I fell on it."
I drug him out of the road and back of the lumber pile I had been laying on, and hurt him considerable a-doing it.
"Now," I says, "what can I do fur you?"
"I reckon yo' better leave me," he says, "without yo' want to get yo'self mixed up in all this."
"If I do," I says, "you may bleed to death here: or anyway you would get found in the morning and be run in."
"Yo' mighty good to me," says he, "considering yo' are no kin to this here part of the country at all. I reckon by yo' talk yo' are one of them damn Yankees, ain't yo'?"
In Illinoise a Yankee is some one from the East, but down South he is anybody from north of the Ohio, and though that there war was fought forty years ago some of them fellers down there don't know damn and Yankee is two words yet. But shucks!—they don't mean no harm by it! So I tells him I am a damn Yankee and asts him agin if I can do anything fur him.