“I don’t think nothin’ about it,” said Hank. “I know it. Why, I tell you what happened. You see, Zac didn’t have time to look what was on the other side of me when he shot, but jest as he pulled the trigger, he noticed an old cow-brute standin’ about fifty yards off chewin’ his cud. Well, this old steer jumped, so Zac said he must of hit him. Still we couldn’t see no wound on him. We roped him and looked at the critter close and found a bullet hole in his dew-lap.”
“In his what?” asked Lanky.
“Why, in his dew-lap,” said Hank. “That’s the grissle thing that hangs down from the neck of a cow-brute jest where it joins on to the breast. They used to vaccinate for the black-leg by makin’ a hole in it. We knowed the steer couldn’t be hurt much there; so we turns him loose, and he gits up, and starts off.
“He hadn’t gone more than twenty steps, when his neck was all swole up, big as a saddle-hoss. Then he begin to rave and charge and beller so pitifully that we jest shot him to git him out of his misery.
“That’s how pizenous them centipedes are. When I saw that pore brute all swole up and out of his head with torment, I knowed what a close call I’d had.”
Lanky’s attention had been divided between Red and the narrator. He had glanced several times at Joe also, who was sitting complacent, but not contemptuous, listening with the respect due a good liar even though a comparatively inexperienced one. But Red, during the first part of Hank’s narrative had been in a deep study. He rolled several cigarettes, only to throw them away after taking a puff or two. He appeared to listen; yet it was obvious that the narrator did not have his full attention. Near the climax to Hank’s tale, however, his countenance brightened up, and from that time he sat quietly as one having an ace in the hole. When Hank finished, he was ready.
“I didn’t have no crack shot, nor no friend of no kind to help me out once when I come near passin’ in my checks out in the Glass Mountains.
“I never did know what was the matter with that fool hoss I was ridin’. He’d always been a mighty sensible animal—fine cow-pony, quarter hoss, single-footer, and the best night hoss on the outfit. I’d rode him hard that day, and I thought maybe he was tired of life and took a sudden notion to kill his self like an English feller that come to our outfit and stayed a while once. Then, again, I thought he might of went blind all at once. I never could figger it out. Anyway, he never acted like that before.”
“What did he do?” asked Lanky.
“What did he do? He done a plenty. Still I don’t blame him, pore brute. There must have been somethin’ the matter.