He closed his eyes obediently. She slipped a cool hand under the nape of his neck and let it rest.
“That feels good,” he murmured. “You're so cool, Saxon. Your hand, and you, all of you. Bein' with you is like comin' out into the cool night after dancin' in a hot room.”
After several minutes of quiet, he began to giggle.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Oh, nothin'. I was just thinkin'—thinking of them mutts doin' me up—me, that's done up more scabs than I can remember.”
Next morning Billy awoke with his blues dissipated. From the kitchen Saxon heard him painfully wrestling strange vocal acrobatics.
“I got a new song you never heard,” he told her when she came in with a cup of coffee. “I only remember the chorus though. It's the old man talkin' to some hobo of a hired man that wants to marry his daughter. Mamie, that Billy Murphy used to run with before he got married, used to sing it. It's a kind of a sobby song. It used to always give Mamie the weeps. Here's the way the chorus goes—an' remember, it's the old man spielin'.”
And with great solemnity and excruciating flatting, Billy sang:
“O treat my daughter kind-i-ly; An' say you'll do no harm, An' when I die I'll will to you My little house an' farm—My horse, my plow, my sheep, my cow, An' all them little chickens in the ga-a-rden.
“It's them little chickens in the garden that gets me,” he explained. “That's how I remembered it—from the chickens in the movin' pictures yesterday. An' some day we'll have little chickens in the garden, won't we, old girl?”