“You saw Scenery?” asks Magpie joyful-like. “What’d he say?”
“Not much,” grins Slow-Elk. “He said to hang on to them keys, ’cause there ain’t no more like ’em, but he spoke too late.”
“I throwed ’em down that hole where Wick Smith bored for water,” said Hip-Shot.
“Keys to what?” I asks.
“Cell door and the jail,” grins Slow-Elk. “Scenery is bottled up.”
The old judge gets up and shakes out his coat-tails.
“Do you mean to say that our estimable sheriff is locked in his own jail?”
“I pass on the ’steamable part, judge,” grins Slow-Elk, “but you sure guessed the last of it to a gnat’s eyelash. Let’s all have a drink on the sheriff’s impossibilities.”
Then we enters Buck’s place. The rest of the surrounding country is in there and they’re enjoying the fulness of the world. Wick Smith is standing on the bar orating, and we listens to his wau-wau. Wick has been dallying with the weaving water, and his voice is full of silv’ry bells:
“—And friends of old, I says to thee all, there may be cities of gold and silver and palaces of paradise personified, but when a feller hankers for a pat on the back and the grasp of a honest hand and——”