“Dead! my baby dead!” sez Ellick Gurley. “Then I am his murderer!”
And he threw up his arms as if he had received a pistol shot right in his heart, and then he fell jest like a log right down in the road. Wall, I disembarked from my democrat, and by the time the B. I. L. had got him up in a more settin’ poster on a log by the side of the road, I wuz by him a-holdin’ his head and a-chafin’ his hands and his forward.
When he come to and riz up and sot upright, his first words wuz—
“Oh! poor Annie! poor girl! how did she bear it, all alone with our dead boy! Oh! my boy! my boy that I killed!”
I see plain that there wuz good in the man, after all.
But the B. I. L. had by this time sprunted up, and wuz a-thinkin’ of his phylakricy, and a-pullin’ it over himself and Ellick, and seemed anxious to sort o’ hush him up, and sez he—
“It wasn’t your doings, it wasn’t the accident that killed the boy, it was probably something else.”
“Yes,” sez I, lookin’ at the B. I. L. straight in the face—“yes, it wuz sunthin’ else, it wuz you! You smooth-faced, selfish hyppocrite, you; it wuz your doin’s that killed the boy! If you had left his Pa alone, and not led him into a condition fit to murder, jest to put a few cents into your own pocket, the boy would have been alive and happy to-day, and so would Ellick and Annie.” Sez I, “It wuz your doin’s, and you don’t want to forgit it!” sez I.
“Yes, it wuz sunthin’ else; it wuz you.”