“Me, too,” Figger Bush quacked. “I’ll he’p Hitchie keep de saloon.”
Mustard Prophet, the scientific agriculturist of the party, took a big red apple from his pocket and bit deeply into its juicy substance. He was trying to appear disinterested, but his favorite kind of apple was tasteless to him now.
“Dar ain’t no use fer de rest of us to go,” Mustard muttered thickly, munching at his apple, and glancing at Pap Curtain. “Skeeter kin handle de case——”
“You got to go wid me, Mustard,” Skeeter interrupted. “Dazzle tole me dat Hopey wus in de house, too—an’ de robbers is killin’ her.”
The part of the apple Mustard held in his fingers slipped away and rolled across the saloon floor; the part he had in his mouth strangled in his quivering throat.
“Dat’s too bad,” he announced in a tone of disinterested sympathy. “But dat serves Hopey right, an’ she deeserves all she gits. Me an’ my nigger wife don’t speak no more. I went dar to-night, an’ axed Hopey to gimme some hot biscuits an’ a few sirup, an’ she wouldn’t do it!”
“I think dis here is yo’ job, Skeeter,” Pap Curtain snarled, the habitual sneer upon his face becoming more acute and repulsive as he tried to conceal his timidity. “Dazzle didn’t want none of us buttin’ in, or she’d axed fer us. Ef you wants to make a hit wid Dazzle, you got to pick up a brave heart an’ go out dar an’ kill dat band of robbers—jes’ like when you wus in de army.”
“But us army soldiers didn’t do no fightin’ all by our lonely selfs,” Skeeter wailed. “We fi’t an’ bled an’ died in regimints!”
“You oughter hab fotch yo’ army home wid you,” Pap sneered. “Somepin like dis might happen sudden any time, an’ you knowed you’d need it.”
The telephone rang sharply, and every man jumped with fright.