"But you needn't tear yourselves away on that account. We haven't gone yet," Dave MacLester added as Soapy said, "Drive on!"
Perhaps it was the quiet, unruffled and yet absolutely uncommunicative tones of the Auto Boys that fired Soapy Gaines' wrath. Like a pouter pigeon he swelled up. "Aw, sure, drive on!" he said to Perth, still at the wheel. "And don't you think," he added in a low tone, still pompous but threatening, too—"And don't you think that we won't make 'em get right down on their knees to us or wish they'd never left home."
"Or both!" laughed Pickton in that unbearably rasping way.
"Yes, or both," was the response, "and some more on top of that! I'm going into this thing right, now, just for that low-down answer of Worth's if nothing else—the little two-by-four!"
"But yet—"
It was Perth who would have spoken, and it was in his mind to say that he saw nothing particularly objectionable in Billy Worth's words; that his answer to Pick's observation was natural enough.
"'But yet'? Just you keep your 'but yet' till later on. I'm talking now!" interrupted Soapy, savagely. "I'm talking now, I say!"
The fact is, indeed, that Mr. Soapy Gaines was quite apt to talk too much.