“Gimme my baby!” Happy screamed. “I’se gwine back home to-night on de fust train!”
“Honey, don’t let nothin’ detain you!” Skeeter admonished her. “I don’t want yo’ baby—I’d druther hab a cockle-bur in my sock. Jes’ take yo’ brat an’ go!”
In a few minutes the barroom was empty, the crowd splitting into two parts, following either Happy Rocket or Shin Bone home, according to their sympathies.
In the middle of the floor Skeeter found a tin coffee pot. It was battered, broken, and useless, and one side was caved in until it resembled a big, toothless mouth grinning at him in sardonic glee. He bent over it, examined it from all sides, but did not touch it. The mishaps of the night had made him cowardly.
“Nigger luck is always bad luck,” he whispered. “Dis here tin pot might be a bomb an’ bust right in my face. I’ll let Little Bit pick it up when be cleans up in de mawnin’. All dis night bad luck has kotch me befo an’ behime—mostly behime.”
Skeeter sat down to rest his mind and collect his impressions. He was not the jaunty, confident, debonair young man he had been a few hours before. He felt like something had gone out of him, fading like breath upon a razor, leaving him but a shell of his former self, never to recover what he had lost and be the same again.
Tears of weakness and nervous collapse came into his eyes and rolled down his cheeks to the corners of his mouth. He wiped them away with the palm of his yellow hand and spoke again:
“One time when I wus little I axed Marse John Flournoy whar I come from. He tole me dat a buzzard laid me an’ de debbil hatched me in de hot ashes. I don’t misdoubt dem words, because I been ketchin’ hell ever since!”