“I beg everybody’s pardon for my rude interruption. But it’s deadly boresome to hear your own funeral encomium, don’t you think?”
“I judge from the general tenor of Mr. Rouke’s remarks that anything you do is perfectly all right,” Gaitskill laughed. Then he asked: “Where have you been stopping while in Tickfall, Miss Cordona?”
“I suppose the sheriff will put me under arrest,” she answered with a throaty, chuckling laugh, “but I have been a cook in Mr. Flournoy’s home in the last five days. In the South a black face indicates a nigger, and I knew that my only door of entrance to a white man’s home was through the kitchen.”
“Oh, Lord,” Flournoy mourned, “I’ve lost the best cook in the whole world! Tom, I was going to invite you out for a meal to show her off——”
He was interrupted by the voice of a man sobbing. The cry seemed to rack and tear the throat as if Pain had picked up the heart in red hot pincers holding the quivering flesh until it dropped the thick, black blood of agony.
They turned and saw Skeeter Butts slip out of the door of the little theater.
He had followed Lalla Cordona down the street, had entered the little theater unobserved, and had heard enough to know that all the blossoms of love in his heart had fruited into Dead Sea apples filled with ash and soot.
“Gawd!” he sighed pitifully, as he dragged his leaden feet toward the Hen-Scratch saloon, “I wish I wus a white man ’stead of a coon!”