I thought Swatty was going to stand there forever, looking into the shanty boat, but pretty soon he went inside, and that shows he's as brave as he always brags he is. I wouldn't have gone in for a million billion quadrillion dollars. In a minute he come out and he dropped off the end of the deck and sort of crouched low. He kept crouched low as he come up the railroad bank, and he crouched low when he dodged down the other side, so I crouched low, too, and went down the other side of the railroad bank. And when Swatty come up to me I saw he was scared, too, but he wasn't scared the way I was. I was just scared because I'd seen a dead man, but Swatty was frightened.
There was a lot of tall ragweed and a pile of railroad ties in the bottom of the cut along side the railroad track, and Swatty went right in close to the pile of ties where the ragweed hid everything and he sat down there. He looked pretty frightened.
“Well,” he said, “we killed him.”
That was the first I'd thought that we'd killed the dead man; but the minute Swatty said it I knew we had killed him by shooting through the windows of the shanty boat. I couldn't shake any more than I had been shaking so I just kept on shaking like I had been, but I got sicker at my stomach. When I was through being sick Swatty he got mad.
“Stop shaking like that!” he said. “We've gone and done it and we've got to think what we 're going to do about it. Stop shaking and help me think.”
“I c-c-c-can't stop sh-sh-sh-shaking!” I said. “I w-w-w-would if I c-c-c-c-could, w-w-w-wouldn't I?”
“Well, you've got to stop shaking,” Swatty said. “If you go shaking all around town like that everybody will know we did it. If you don't stop shaking I'll lick you!”
I began to cry. I didn't cry because Swatty said he'd lick me but because I just had to cry. So Swatty tried to make me stop shivering. He took the backbone of my neck in his thumb and fingers and pinched it hard, because you can stop hiccoughs that way; but it didn't do any good. So he got madder.
“What are you shaking for, anyway?” he asked. “I ain't shaking.”
“W-well, y-y-you h-h-haven't got r-r-religion,” I said. “It's w-w-worse for anybody that's g-g-g-got r-r-religion to kill anybody.”