All uh which shows that there ain’t no use arguing with Magpie Simpkins. He can do no wrong. Uh course he might do things that he’d be sorry for, but he never figures that he’s wrong—just uh little mistaken for the time being.
“Come back broke?” I asks.
“Uh-huh. My gosh, Ike, I must uh spent money like uh timber Willie. If I knowed what that animile cost me I could figure how much the trip cost me.”
“You don’t have to let X equal the missing quantity, Magpie,” says I. “You had nine hundred when yuh left, and you’re broke now; therefore the trip cost me four hundred and fifty. Sabe?”
Magpie don’t sleep well that night. First he has an argument with that Chicago bartender. Uh course, me being an innocent bystander or bylayer, I gets hit in the nose. I cautions him to fight the other way. He apologizes uh heap, but inside uh five minutes he starts another fight with some colored person over the way his bed is made and I gets pitched out of the bunk and hits my head on the stove.
I’ve been mistook for an Injun, and one time “Red River” Radkey absorbs too much of the fermented foam, and mistakes me for uh pink pollywog, but that’s the first time that anybody ever mistook me for uh colored porter, and it makes me mad.
I climbs right back on that bunk, gets Magpie by the feet, and drags him around the yard in the moonlight. He’s plumb awake and docile enough to apologize again when I finishes the third lap around the woodpile, so he climbs back on the bunk and I takes uh blanket and sleeps on the floor.
The next morning we saddles our burros and starts for town. We’re out uh spuds, and we needs some drill steel. Magpie leads the procession, setting on the rump of uh fuzzy-looking jackass. He’s wearing that hard hat, green and red shirt—he sheds his vest—and on his hands he wears them gray gloves. He sure is uh thing to see. Even the burros acts bashful around him.
“I reckon I’ll make the inhabitants uh Piperock set up and take notice,” he states, admiring himself.
He sets the pot-shaped hat on the peak of his head, and brushes off that loco shirt with his gloves.