Rawson, he kinda cocked one ear. “Wal,” he says, easy like, “give me rattlesnake on toast.”
Nobody cheeped fer a minute, ’cause the boys was stumped fer somethin’ to go on with. But just as I was gittin’ nervous that the conversation was peterin’ out, Boston speaks up.
“Rattlesnake?” he says; “did he say rattlesnake?”
Like a shot, Rawson turned towards him, wrinklin’ his forrid and wigglin’ his moustache awful fierce. “That’s what I said,” he answers, voice plumb down to his number ’levens.
It give me my show. I drug Boston away. “Gee!” I says, “on this side of the Mississippi, you got to be keerful how you go shoot off you’ mouth! And when you remark on folks’s eatin’, you don’t want t’ look tickled.”
Wal, that was all the colour he got till night, when I had somethin’ more prepared. We took up a collection fer winda-glass, and Chub Flannagan, who can roll a gun the prettiest you ever seen, walked up and down nigh Boston’s stoppin’-place, invitin’ the fellers t’ come out and “git et up,” makin’ one ’r two of us dance the heel-and-toe when we showed ourselves, and shootin’ up the town gen’ally.
Then, fer a week, nothin’ happened.
It was just about then that Rose got another letter from Macie. And it seemed t’ me that the little gal ’d changed her tune some. She said Noo York took a turrible lot of money–clothes, and grub, and so forth and so on. Said they was so blamed little oxygen in the town that a lamp wouldn’t burn, and they’d got to use ’lectricity. And–that was all fer this time, ’cause she had t’ write her paw.
“I s’pose,” I says to Rose, “that it’d be wastin’ my breath t’ ast––”
“Yas, Cupid,” she answers, “but it’ll be O. K. when she sees you.”