Joe Johnson drew a pistol as he spoke, and Jimmy Phœbus saw his nervous determination too clearly to provoke it.
"Now, put this dab upon the wagon," Johnson said, referring to the bed, and it was carried down by the brothers, and the dead man's portmanteau thrown in beside it.
"Joe! Joe!" came the voice of Patty Cannon, from the guest's room, "take the poor old woman that's raised you along."
"Stow yer wid!" he answered; "we go to be gentlemen in a land where you would spot us black. Cross cove and mollisher no more; raise another Joe Johnson, if you can, to make this old hulk lush with business: I give it to you."
He was gone in the vague dawn. She fell upon her face across the little bar and moaned,
"A pore, pore, pore old woman!"
How long she had been leaning there she did not know, till familiar sounds fell on her ears, and, looking up with a cry of recognition, she shouted,
"Van Dorn! God bless you, Van Dorn! Is you alive again?"
The Captain was supported in the arms of another person, who took him, ghastly pale, into the little bar and laid him upon her pallet, muttering,
"I loved him as I never loved A male."