With which he handed a ten-dollar bill to Bill, who crumpled it up and shoved it into his pocket, without a word of acknowledgment.
The situation was delicate to the last degree. A few feet away stood Herb, whose homely face spoke eloquently of the scrimmage through which he had passed. One eye was closed, the upper lip was swollen to twice its usual size, and the cheeks were bruised, to say nothing of the rent shirt, with more than one crimson stain showing upon it. To offer to settle the matter by handing the sufferer money was like adding insult to injury, though the majority of mankind have little trouble in swallowing offenses of that nature.
No one could have met the point more tactfully.
“Herb,” said Harvey, stepping toward him; “you and my colored man had a run-in and the last I saw of him he was going for life.”
“You bet he was!” said the other; “it’s blamed lucky for him he run so fast I couldn’t ketch him; if I’d done so there would have been a dead nigger in these parts.”
Harvey hid the pleasure that this reply gave him. Bunk had escaped from his foe and was safe somewhere.
“He got me foul,” Herb added, feeling that some explanation was due his fellows who had seen him in his humiliating situation; “but I throwed him off and then he took to his heels.”
Herb added several sulphurous exclamations which it isn’t necessary to place on record.
“I saw him running, but I notice that he managed to injure your clothes and it is no more than right that the damage should be taken out of his wages. Will this make it square?”
When Herb saw the size of the bill handed to him his little gray eyes—or rather one of them—sparkled with greed. But the three who had not been thus remembered were angered.