Then they listened while Dude told his story.
After leaving his cabin with the jug, he had taken several drinks and had crawled under the porch of the commissary store to sleep because he was afraid to go back home to listen to what Dainty was sure to say about his conduct. He had been awakened by having something thrown over his face—and this afterward proved to be the coat and vest which Tucky Sugg had taken from Hitch Diamond. Dude heard two men talking, heard them call each other by name, heard them enter the store for robbery; then Dude had seized his jug and had run to the night-watchman and made a report.
The night-watchman, running to the store, had been killed.
Dude, dodging among the lumber piles, had been captured; the only man who could clear him of suspicion had just been killed; his captors would not listen to explanations, so Dude took a desperate chance by jumping into the river, and had escaped.
What the mob thought was Dude’s woolly head bobbing upon the surface of the water was really Dude’s derby hat. Expecting them to shoot at his hat, Dude waited until the right time, and artfully contributed a splash and a scream, and the mob thought he had got cramps and sunk.
Chucklingly, Dude told his auditors that he was beating his hat down the river about thirty yards, swimming like Jonah inside the whale.
He returned to his cabin that night, explained everything to Dainty, mounted a mustang, and rode to Ginny Babe Chew’s cabin, where she concealed him until the time of the trial. Skeeter had seen his face at the dormer window when the chicken-house burned down.
“I knowed dat Dinner Gaze an’ Tucky Sugg done it, Marse Henry,” Skeeter cackled. “I knowed it all de time—I had a hunch!”
“I knowed it, too,” Ginny Babe Chew rumbled. “I’s got a hoodoo face.”
“I knowed it,” Hitch Diamond growled. “Goldie told me.”