On this particular anniversary gala preparations of extra splendor were afoot in honor of the return of Bully Nick, once more a free man, not because in equity he was held worthy to be at large, so much as through a technical slip by which but six jurors had been requisitioned to sit on his case, whereas, as his backers claimed, he was territorially entitled to be adjudged guilty by a full dozen good men and true.
"Well, I'm dazzled fer fair," announced the hero, as, amid cheers from his friends and followers, he alighted from the stage. "This here bloomin' Paradise ain't never Lost Shoe Creek."
"Sure, 'tis! Betcherboots! That's what!" he was assured.
Nick rubbed astonished eyes. "By gum, a Gospel-mill!"
"Aye, and filled to overflowing every Sabbath, Nicholas," proudly stated good Maclane.
"Wa'al, y' see," Mops hastened to apologize to his leader for this hated concession to religion, "the gals like piousness."
The neat jail next the church was described by Barney as "just an impty forrum intoirely, owing to the ladies' distaste for the spacies of bird such cages are controived for, begorra!"
The decorative touch to the personal appearance of his followers, in honor of the holiday, naturally came in for the Bully's quizzical attention: their shorn faces; the soap "with the tony smell" in vogue; the paper collars with jeweled studs in which, all day, Ikey had been doing a rushing trade, were noted by him categorically till Bill silenced him by stating that "style was like for to fetch the girls."
Gumboot Annie, to whose hostelry he was conducted to drink his own health, had been allowed to reopen, he was informed, under close restriction and surveillance from "that blamed Scarlett." Nevertheless, as she told Nick, spitting with deliberation, not being in business for salubrious ends merely, she was making great profit out of "moderate drinkin' and no drunks," through the girls' preference for sober cavaliers. Or, as she phrased it, "the gals won't swaller the booze."
This was too much for the Bully's equanimity. "The gals, indeed!" Slapping his knee, he chuckled. "The hell!"