“Not me! If I’m goin’ to die, good. I’ll die as Dirty Shirt Jones, not as a buzzard-headed bug-hunter who is lookin’ for somethin’ that crawled away and died a million years ago.”
“Well, what yuh goin’ to do, Dirty? Figure a little, can’t yuh?”
“Figgers be ——! I’m to camp right here until dark, or until some figger of vengeance cometh along and herds me hence. Sabe? Give yourself up, go out and get shot, choke yourself to death with your own fair hands—do what you think best, Ike, but old man Jones’ little fair-haired child is goin’ inside a nice cool cell and sleep off a headache.”
“I can’t do nothin’ but foller yuh,” says I, sad-like.
“Your attachment for me is sweet,” says he. “I’m all choked up with e-motion, and if I didn’t feel so bad I would cry.”
Sometimes I wonder who left that quart of hooch under that bunk. We moved the bunk over, so nobody could see us from the sheriff’s office, and there she stood, brave and bold. Me and Dirty surrounds it, inhales the odors of Araby, originated in Kentucky and fixed with equal parts of alkali water, copperas, chewing-tobacco and coal-oil, for the consumption of Piperock’s leading citizens.
Then we humps up on the bunk and wishes each other a great deal of pleasure in the future. I reckon we done a lot of wishin’. I dreamed of a whole danged string of wishes hanging on a line like laundry out to dry, and when I woke it was dark. Dirty Shirt sounds like a dry saw going through a greasewood butt. I’m about to wake him up, when I hears voices. I jabs my heel into Dirty’s shins, and he sets up like one of them mechanical toys.
“Yeah, and I hope yuh gets ninety-nine years and the balance of your life,” we hears Scenery Sims saying in his rusty voice. “I’m goin’ to put yuh in and then I’m goin’ up-town and tell all about it. Some of them snake-hunters think I’m no good as a sheriff, but I gets my man.”
“Some old lady must ’a’ got drunk and fell down and busted her leg,” says Dirty in a hoarse whisper. “Hear that woodchuck peep?”
The door of the cell is yanked open, and two men comes inside. Me and Dirty ain’t ready for to be locked in, so as they comes in we goes out. Scenery stands there in the dark, sort of stiff-like. Dirty Shirt lights a match and holds it up. I hears Scenery give a gasp and then the match went out. Then his gun falls on the floor.