“’Scuse me, boss!” Hitch grunted.
The watchman hung three strong fingers in the collar of Hitch’s white shirt. Hitch didn’t like that. He pulled away. The watchman pulled too. The inevitable happened.
Hitch’s shirt tore half in two and hung limply in the watchman’s hands as Hitch raced down the wharf clad in socks, pants, and a red undershirt!
The watchman disgustedly tossed his spoils on top of a lumber pile and gave himself up to the placid contemplation of the flight of some gulls on the river.
“Lawd,” Hitch sighed, when he had dodged around the distant end of the wharf and had time to look down at his deficient apparel. “Dis here town shore is hard on clothes!”
III
FOURTEEN SWALLOWS.
Keeping the river levee between himself and the town so that no one could see him in his half-dressed condition, Hitch departed from the vicinity of Sawtown with expedition. When he reached the edge of the woods about a mile from the mill, he sat down to think a way out of his difficulties.
“My head is jes’ like a mule’s head,” he announced to himself. “I cain’t hold but only one notion at a time. I been thinkin’ so heavy all de time about my lost money dat I done loss all my good clothes, too. I oughter knowed better. Now I’s gwine git active an’ sot myse’f up in bizzness agin.”
He sat for a long time in deep, silent meditation, trying to extract an idea from his slow brain. Then he concluded:
“I drunk too much dram in N’Awleens. My head ain’t right. Ef I could git me a good dram now, mebbe I could think up a notion whut to do.”