“Maybe I will and maybe I won't,” Swatty said. “I ain't made up my mind yet what I'll do. I ain't afraid of his old stabbin' knife, I tell you that! He can't scare me! There ain't any Slim Finnegan that ever lived could scare me. If he pulled his old frog stabber on me I'd—”
He stopped short and I saw him put out one hand and grab the log, and his face looked like a dead man's, and then I looked up from the callus I was fixing on my foot and I saw Slim Finnegan too. He was standing right in front of us with a pistol in his hand and the pistol was pointed right at us. He had a mean-looking face, sort of foxy and sort of sneery, and now it had a sort of grin on it, and it was ugly. It was the kind of grin he had when he twisted a little kid's arm and made him scream. He was just like he always was, sort of muddy-haired and yellowfaced and slouchy in the shoulders, and tobacco juice in the corners of his mouth. He looked just the way he always looked when he was going to have some fun hurting somebody.
I felt pretty sick, I felt hot in the stomach, as if a bullet had already made a hot hole there. I sort of twitched in different places as each place got to thinking it was the place the bullet was going to hit. I don't know what Bony did; I had all I wanted to do without thinking of anybody else. All of a sudden Slim opened his dirty mouth and swore at us the worst anybody ever heard.
“Get up out of there, you”—something—“rats!” he said in the meanest voice he had. “Get up!”
So we got up.
“You get along there, now!” he ordered, swearing some more; and he waved us where to go.
We didn't say a word, not even Swatty. We just went; and instead of thinking I felt the bullet coming into my stomach I thought I felt it coming into the joints of my back. I put my hand behind me to sort of help stop it if it came. That way he sent us through the brush to the sandy place. He walked us toward the powder house, and then, all at once, he shouted at us to throw down our grapevine cigarettes. He asked us if we wanted to blow him to hell. So we threw them down.
Then he came up to me and hit me on the side of the head and knocked me down in the sand, and threw Bony on top of me, and slapped Swatty so he staggered; but Swatty didn't fall. He swore back at Slim, and Slim slapped him again and knocked him down. For a million dollars I would n't have sworn back at a stabber that had a pistol; but that's how Swatty is. Anyway, he was the only one of us that could swear good enough to make it worth while swearing back.
Well, Slim had left the door of the powder house open and when he had us all knocked down he came over and kicked at us, and I was the one he kicked. He swore all the time, a steady stream, and it was the thoroughest swearing I ever heard. It sounded like business. Then he jerked Swatty up and slung him toward the powder house and slung him inside, and then he took me and Bony and slung us the same way. He slung us all into the powder house.
“I'll teach you to go blattin' about me when you see me!” he said. “Dirty little rats! I'll learn you a lesson! You 'll never come your sneakin' spy in' on me again! You'll have enough when I get through with you this time. You want to know what I'm goin' to do with you?”