Dinner Gaze, his clothes torn from him until he was bare to the waist, his whole body screaming with pain from countless injuries, slowly followed Hitch in his retreat, chopping at him with weakening arms, still fighting with the broken table-leg.
“Look up, Dinner Gaze!” Ginny Babe Chew bawled. “Dis is yo’ la-ast time to see de hoodoo face!”
Unconsciously responding to the command, Dinner Gaze raised his pain-shot eyes upward, and looked into the fat face, through whose rolls of flesh two green pig eyes gleamed upon him with a serpent’s venom and deadly malignity.
The heavy iron cuspidor came down with a crash. It crushed the criminal’s head like an egg-shell. It bounced, fell on its rounded edge, and rolled slowly across the floor.
Dinner Gaze fell face downward, kicked the floor three times with the toes of his shoes, and died.
“Dar—now!” Ginny Babe Chew whooped.
Then she held out a fat hand to the slim young girl standing beside the table and said:
“Gimme yo’ hand an’ he’p me down offen dis table, honey! Dis here duck is too dang fat to be roostin’ so high!”
XVIII
THE HOODOO FACE SMILES.
The panic and outflow of negroes from the trial chamber in the Tickfall courthouse started a riot-call in the town.