They talked a few minutes; then one of them got off his horse, handed his gun and belt to one of the others, took off his big fur coat, pulled out a white cloth and waved it and came walking very slowly toward the town. This seemed fair enough; I had heard my Uncle Ben tell about flags of truce in the war. I waved my handkerchief out of the port-hole and then waited three or four minutes as if we in the houses were talking it over; then I walked boldly out the back door. Kaiser wanted to go along, so I let him.
The man walked very slowly, and I did the same, but we came up within a few steps of each other at last. This was out not very far from the water-tank. I had expected it was Pike himself, and, sure enough, it was, wearing a leather jacket with the collar turned up.
MY MEETING WITH PIKE, TRACK’S END, FEBRUARY FIFTH
“It’s you, is it, Jud?” said he in a kind of sneering tone. (It seemed strange to me to hear a man’s voice, I had been so long alone.)
“Yes, it’s me,” I answered. “What do you want?”
“I sort of thought these here Track’s Enders might send out a full-grown man to talk to me about such an important matter,” he went on.
“I was man enough to catch you a couple of times and it was only your good luck that you weren’t hung up here in Track’s End by the neck,” I said, a little put out by the way he spoke, because I was almost as big as he was.