“Stay right where you are for five minutes,” was the final warning from behind the cambric mask. “Five minutes, remember! Anybody who tries to come down those steps before that five minutes is up is going to get shot.”
The door slammed. Through the closed door the crap-shooters, each in his place and all listening as intently as devout worshippers in a church, heard the swift footsteps dying away. Josh Herron brought down his arms and took two steps forward.
“Wait, Josh, the time limit ain't up yit,” counselled a well-wisher.
“Oh, I ain't goin' nowheres jest yit—I'm very comfortable here,” said Josh. He stooped and seemed to pick up some small object from the bare planks.
Five minutes later—or perhaps six—a procession moving cautiously, silently and in single file passed down the creaky stairs. It was noted—and commented upon—that the owner of the raided place, heaviest loser and chief mourner though he was, tagged away back at the tail of the line. Only Babe Givens was behind him, and Babe was well behind him too. At the foot of the stairs the frontmost man projected his head forth into the night, an inch at a time, ready to jerk it back again. But to his inquiring vision Franklin Street under its gas lamps yawned as empty as a new made grave.
For some unuttered and indefinable reason practically all of the present company felt in a mood promptly to betake themselves home. On his homeward way Josh Herron travelled in the company of a sorely shaken grocery clerk, and between them they, going up the street, discussed the startling episode in which they had just figured.
“Lookin' down that pair of barrels certainly made a true believer out of old Highpockets, didn't it?” said the grocer's clerk, when the event had been gone over verbally from its beginning to its end. “Did you happen to see, Josh, how slow he poked his old head out past them doorjambs even after Jasper Waller told him the coast was clear? Put me in mind of one of these here old snappin'-turtles comin' out of his shell after a skeer. Well, I had a little touch of the buck-ager myself,” he confessed.
“It was sorter up to our long-laiged friend to be a little bit careful,” said Josh Herron. “Coupled up the way he is, one buckshot would be liable to go through his gizzard and his lights at the same time.”
A little later the grocery clerk spoke, in reference to a certain quite natural curiosity which seemingly lay at the top of his thoughts, since he had voiced it at least three times within the short space of one city block:
“I wonder who that there runty hold-up could 'a' been?”