Sheriff Flournoy lay on the floor with the blood flowing from a wound on his neck. He crawled over and picked up the pistol which Skeeter Butts had given to Hitch Diamond and which Hitch had discarded. He extracted the cartridges from his own useless pistol and slipped them into Skeeter’s gun, for he had given that weapon to Skeeter and they were of the same calibre.
Just at that moment Tucky Sugg fought his way through the tangle of human arms and legs and sprang into the open window. Then he went screaming downward to his death as a bullet from the sheriff’s pistol went with him, pocketed in the murderer’s heart!
Then, as if the crack of the sheriff’s pistol was her cue to enter, another woman came up-stage and stood in the blazing light of battle. She weighed four hundred and ten pounds, and resembled a balloon divided in the middle by an apron string. She was conducted by Dainty Blackum and a strange young negro man, and her name was Ginny Babe Chew.
Inside the railing, she picked up a heavy iron cuspidor, and walked over to the table where, earlier in the morning, the district attorney had sat.
“He’p me up on dis here table, honey!” she grunted, hugging the heavy cuspidor in her arms.
The district attorney lay unconscious under the table on which Ginny stood.
Ginny announced her position by a loud bellow. She raised the large iron cuspidor above her head with her fat arms, and every pound of her monstrous weight was quivering with unspeakable hate.
“Git outen my way, Hitchie!” she whooped. “Gimme room accawdin’ to my fat, sonny! Let yo’ mammy put somepin acrost!”
For more than a minute Sheriff Flournoy had been fingering his pistol, waiting for a chance to shoot without killing Hitch Diamond. Ginny Babe Chew’s remarkable stunt gave him pause and caused him to lower his gun with astonishment.
Hitch reeled and stumbled backward. His eyes were glazing, his right arm hung broken and useless at his side, he was one bloody mass of wounds.