“Whut I aimed to say was,” corrected Pleasant mentally, “I didn't know nobody who knowed me that couldn't git it.” And he jingled the coins in his pockets that at daybreak that morning had been in the pockets of Ham and King.
His Last Christmas Gift
The sergeant got the wounded man to his feet and threw one arm around his waist. Then he all but carried him, stumbling along, with both hands clasped across his eyes, down the ravine that looked at night like some pit of hell. For along their path a thousand coke-ovens spat forth red tongues that licked northward with the wind, shot red arrows into the choking black smoke that surged up the mountainside, and lighted with fire the bellies of the clouds rolling overhead.
“Whar you takin' me?”
“Hospital.” The mountainer stopped suddenly.
“Why, I can't see them ovens!”
“You come on, Jim.”
Next morning Jim lay on a cot with a sheet drawn to his chin and a grayish, yellow bandage covering forehead and eyes down to the tip of his nose. When the surgeon lifted that bandage the nurse turned her face aside, and what was under it, or rather what was not under it, shall not be told. Only out in the operating-room the smooth-faced young assistant was curiously counting over some round leaden pellets, and he gave one low whistle when he pushed into a pile a full fourscore.
“He said he was a-lookin' through a keyhole,” the sergeant reported, “an' somebody let him have it with both barrels—but that don't go. Jim wouldn't be lookin' through no keyhole; he'd bust the door down.”
Nor could the sergeant learn more. He had found the man stumbling down Possum Hollow, and up that hollow the men and women of the mining camp did not give one another away.