“Jeff, don't I see a gate up yonder in the track fence right at the first turn?” he asked.
“Yas, suh,” said Jeff eagerly. “'Tain't locked neither. I come through it myse'f today. It opens on to a little road whut leads out past the stables to the big pike. I kin—”
The old judge dropped his wriggling servitor and had Captain Buck Owings by the shoulder with one hand and was pointing with the other up the track, and was speaking, explaining something or other in a voice unusually brisk for him.
“See yonder, son!” he was saying. “The big oak on the inside—and the gate is jest across from it!”
Comprehension lit up the steamboat captain's face, but the light went out as he slapped his hand back to his hip pocket—and slapped it flat.
“I knew I'd forgot something!” he lamented, despairingly. “Needin' one worse than I ever did in my whole life—and then I leave mine home in my other pants!”
He shot the judge a look. The judge shook his head.
“Son,” he said, “the circuit judge of the first judicial district of Kintucky don't tote such things.”
Captain Buck Owings raised a clenched fist to the blue sky above and swore impotently. For the third time the grandstand crowd was starting its roar. Judge Priest's head began to waggle with little sidewise motions.
Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of King's Hell hounds, rambled with weaving indirectness round the corner of the grandstand not twenty feet from them. His gangrened cartridge-box was trying to climb up over his left shoulder from behind, his eyes were heavy with a warm and comforting drowsiness, and his Springfield's iron butt-plate was scurfing up the dust a yard behind him as he hauled the musket along by the muzzle.