“I never got hit,” says I.
“You never got— Saya-a-y! Oh, you didn’t get hit, eh? Well, that’s too bad!”
“Well, what they shootin’ at me for?”
“We might ask ’em—some time. Dang yuh!”
That last wasn’t for me. A puncher raised up out of a wagon-box across the street and his bullet plowed a furrow in the sidewalk between me and Hashknife. Hashknife’s .45-70 spoke its little piece, and soon we seen that feller hop a circle plumb around the corner. Somebody else took a shot at him on the wing, but I reckon that he was so bow-legged that he didn’t get hit.
Another Johnny Wise got up on the roof of that gambling-house and begins to spin lead promiscuous-like, sort of protecting himself with the top of the false front, but he didn’t reckon on anybody using a rifle on his fort. He wasn’t shooting at us, but we didn’t mind that. Hashknife lines up on that false front and his first bullet kicked a hole in them old boards that you could shove your hand through.
Mister Johnny Wise just upended over the ridge of the building and took the high dive over the other side. Somebody creased the peak of the roof just a second after his panties got away from there.
“You keep on and you’ll hurt somebody,” says I. “’Pears to me that you’re horning into this shindig without knowing the facts of the case. You may be shooting at our side.”
“In a case like that, I ain’t got no side, Sleepy. I has been shot at and the same makes me angry.”
“Sa-a-ay,” says a voice kinda behind us, and we turns our heads to see a little bow-legged puncher hugging the side of the building.