“Go on!” shouts Magnolia; and bounces up and down in her chair. “Go on!”
But the first fine histrionic flavour has been poisoned by that interruption. Andy takes his seat at table. He resumes the eating of his pork steak and potatoes, but listlessly. Perhaps he is a little ashamed of the extent to which he has been carried away by his own recital. “Slipped out,” he mumbled.
“Well, I should say as much!” Parthy retorted, ambiguously. “What kind of language can a body expect, you hanging around show-boat riff-raff.”
Magnolia would not be cheated of her dénouement. “But did he? Did he shoot it off, or did he fix it, or what? What did he do?”
“He set it, all right. They gave him his twenty-five and told him to get the h—— out of there, and he got. But they had to get the boat out—the towboat they’d saved—and no pilot but Hard Harry. So next day they put him on the hurricane deck, under a tarpaulin because the rain was pouring the way it does down there worse than any place in the world, just about. And with two men steering, he brings the boat to Baton Rouge seventy-five miles through bayou and Mississippi. Yessir.”
Magnolia breathed again.
“And who’s this,” demanded Mrs. Hawks, “was telling you all this fol-de-rol, did you say?”
“Swager himself. Harry. Hard Harry Swager, they call him.” (You could see the ten-foot pole leap of itself into Mrs. Hawks’ hand as her fingers drummed the tablecloth.) “I was talking to him to-day. Here of late he’s been with the New Sensation. He piloted the Cotton Blossom for years till Pegram decided to quit. Well, sir! He says five hundred people a night on the show boat was nothing, and eight hundred on Saturday nights in towns with a good back-country. Let me tell you right here and now that runs into money. Say a quarter of ’em’s fifty centers, a half thirty-five, and the rest twenty-five. The niggers all twenty-five up in the gallery, course. Naught . . . five times five’s . . . five and carry the two . . . five times two’s ten carry the one . . . five . . .”
Parthy was no fool. She sensed that here threatened a situation demanding measures even more than ordinarily firm.
“I may not know much”—another form of locution often favoured by her. The tone in which it was spoken utterly belied the words; the tone told you that not only did she know much, but all. “I may not know much, but this I do know. You’ve got something better to do with your time than loafing down at the landing like a river rat with that scamp Swager. Hard Harry! He comes honestly enough by that name, I’ll be bound, if he never came honestly by anything else in his life. And before the child, too. Show boats! And language!”