“You don’t have to try”—mournfully—“it jist comes kinda natural for you to do things like that. If I had tried it, I’d probably stubbed my toe before I got to him. Mebbe I’d ’a’ got a few inches of steel in my anatomy and had to kill him.”
“Mebbe I’ll get a few inches of his steel yet,” mused Hashknife. “He don’t look like a feller that would take a baptisin’ in a slack tub and jist grin.”
“Mebbe yuh will, tall feller. Life’s a queer thing, ain’t it? Here we come into this country to try and soak out a case of rheumatism; jist a harmless occupation. The first thing we do is to run into a holdup and a shootin’ scrape.”
“Well, that’s all right, Sleepy.”
“No, it ain’t.” Sleepy spoke with conviction. “It ain’t noways all right. I can see yore nose twitchin’ and yore ears hang down like the ears of a pointer dog or a bloodhound. It ain’t all right, I tell yuh. It ain’t none of our business.”
“Well,” laughed Hashknife, “what about it?”
Sleepy sighed and shifted himself.
“What about it? Hashknife, you know danged well what about it. Ever since I can remember, me and you have been gettin’ off to just this kind of a start. Trouble hunts us, I tell yuh.”
“And you shake hands with it like it was a long-lost brother,” grinned Hashknife. “If yo’re born to be hung, you’ll never choke to death on a fishbone, Sleepy.”
“All right,” nodded Sleepy. “Just the same, I wish we wasn’t here. Mebbe we can get the aches soaked out of you before they start heavin’ lead at us. We don’t sabe these folks down here. Likely got a lot of smart gunmen, too.”