“There ain't no track,” he said, “an' that 'dobe shack don't look much like a town; but otherwise his Knibbs has got our number all right, all right. We are the birds a-flyin' south, and Flannagan was the shiver in the air. Flannagan is a reg'lar frost. Gee! but I betcha dat guy's sore.”
“Why is it, Billy,” asked Bridge, after a moment's silence, “that upon occasion you speak king's English after the manner of the boulevard, and again after that of the back alley? Sometimes you say 'that' and 'dat' in the same sentence. Your conversational clashes are numerous. Surely something or someone has cramped your original style.”
“I was born and brought up on 'dat,'” explained Billy. “SHE taught me the other line of talk. Sometimes I forget. I had about twenty years of the other and only one of hers, and twenty to one is a long shot—more apt to lose than win.”
“'She,' I take it, is PENELOPE,” mused Bridge, half to himself. “She must have been a fine girl.”
“'Fine' isn't the right word,” Billy corrected him. “If a thing's fine there may be something finer, and then something else finest. She was better than finest. She—she was—why, Bridge, I'd have to be a walking dictionary to tell you what she was.”
Bridge made no reply, and the two trudged on toward the whitewashed hut in silence for several minutes. Then Bridge broke it:
And you, my sweet Penelope, out there somewhere you wait for me
With buds of roses in your hair and kisses on your mouth.
Billy sighed and shook his head.
“There ain't no such luck for me,” he said. “She's married to another gink now.”
They came at last to the hut, upon the shady side of which they found a Mexican squatting puffing upon a cigarette, while upon the doorstep sat a woman, evidently his wife, busily engaged in the preparation of some manner of foodstuff contained in a large, shallow vessel. About them played a couple of half-naked children. A baby sprawled upon a blanket just within the doorway.