"Pretty close," Morgan said, answering the animation of her rosy, friendly face with a smile.
"Never mind about bullet holes—you go and begin makin' holes in a piece of biscuit dough," her father commanded.
"When I get good and ready," said Dora, serenely. "You wouldn't care if we got shot to pieces every night as long as we could get up in the morning and make biscuits!"
"Yes, and some of you'd be rootin' around somebody else's kitchen for biscuits to fill your craws if this town laid dead a little while longer," Conboy fired back, his true feeling in the matter revealed.
"I can get a job of biscuit shooter any day," Dora told him, untroubled by the outlook of disaster that attended upon peace and quiet. "I'd rather not have no guests than drunks that come in stagger blind and shoot the plaster off of the wall. It ain't so funny to wake up with your ears full of lime! Ma's sick of it, and I'm sick of it, and it'd be a blessin' if Mr. Morgan would keep the joints all shut till the drunks in this town dried up like dead snakes!"
"You, and your ma!" Conboy grumbled, bearing on an old grievance, an old theme of servitude and discontent.
Morgan recalled the gaunt anxiety of Mrs. Conboy's eyes, hollow of every emotion, as they seemed, but unrest and straining fear. Dora had gone unmarked yet by the cursed fires of Ascalon; only her tongue discovered that the poison of their fumes had reached her heart.
"I'd like to put strickenine in some of their biscuits!" Dora declared, with passionate vehemence.
"Tut-tut! no niggers——"
"How's your face, Mr. Morgan?" Dora inquired, out of one mood into another so quickly the transition was bewildering.