Me and Magpie sets there on the sidewalk and wonders what them Jaspers want of that bird. Art Miller comes over, but he don’t know any more than we do.
“How comes it that everybody covets that monstrosity, Art?” I asks, but Art shakes his head, and digs his toes in the dirt.
“Danged if I know, Ike. I never seen folks so crazy before. I felt that there’s something in the wind for several days. Tellurium, Half Mile, Scenery, Ricky, Dirty Shirt and Judge Steele has been in conference several times up in the judge’s office. Here comes Tellurium. Maybe he’ll tell us what it means.”
Tellurium sets down with us for uh minute, and then gets up and turns around three times, like uh losing gambler does to change his luck.
“I’d admire to know what you wants that freak bird for, Tellurium?” states Art.
“You would, eh?” chuckles Tellurium, hauling some pieces uh paper out of his pocket, and putting ’em into another. “You would, eh? Don’t you know, Art?”
“I wouldn’t ask if I did.”
Tellurium fusses around in his inside pocket, and hauls out uh piece uh writing paper.
“I reckon the tickets are all sold now, so it won’t do no harm to let yuh know,” says he, handing Art the paper. “I done invested seventy-five on my luck, but I reckon you fellers are too late to even buy one ticket. When I left Judge Steele and Half Mile was quarreling over who gets the last number. Read that letter and be sorry yuh didn’t buy no chances. We don’t know who it was written to, but we figures that it was some uh them citified prospectors what was through here uh short time ago. We found it on the floor in Buck’s place, and that’s what brought us up to your place that day, Ike.”
The three of us groups there on the sidewalk and reads what is left of that epistle. The top and one corner is torn off, but that is how she reads from that on down: