“Leave all them particulars to me, square: I’ll fix things up about the tallest. When’s the needful to come?”
“When I return. You know me. Now, Bart, remember, to-night if you can; in three or four weeks at the furthest, I will return.”
The judge turned and left the room, mounted his horse and rode off. Black Bart hitched up his pantaloons, and then fell back in a chair, snapping his fingers, flourishing his heels, and indulging in such tremendous roars of laughter that the landlord rushed in, in deadly alarm, to see what awful calamity had happened.
But still Black Bart gave vent to such appalling laughter-claps, without speaking, throwing himself back as if his spine was made of steel springs, and then jerking himself straight again, kicking his heels, snapping his finger and thumb, and indulging in such extraordinary antics of delight, that Boniface, completely at a loss, stood staring at him in silent wonder, thinking the judge’s communication, whatever it might have been, had completely turned his brain.
“There, Bart, be quiet now,” said the host, soothingly. “You’re scaring the people in the shop out of their wits. What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
“Nothing!” replied Black Bart, going off into another roar, more deafening, if possible, than the first.
“Well, I must say ‘nothing’ seems to be rather funny,” said the puzzled landlord. “Was the judge pumping you about the smugglers?”
“Oh, Lord, don’t!” shouted the sailor with such a yell of laughter, and putting himself into such frightful contortions of delight that the startled host stepped back and grasped the handle of the door with an alarmed glance toward his strange customer.
“I’m off now,” said Bart at length, as soon as he had recovered from this last paroxysm; and wiping the tears from his eyes, he started at a Flora Temple pace down the street, pausing, however, now and then, as his lively sense of the ridiculous overcame him, to indulge in another terrifying peal of laughter, till affrighted pedestrians fled from him in horror, thinking a dangerous lunatic had somewhere broken loose.
He reached a low, smoky, obscure drinking den, near the end of the town, at last, and passing through the bar-room he entered another low, dirty, dingy apartment, where the first individual on whom his eyes rested, was our some-time friend, Mr. Rozzel Garnet.