I ain’t no pessimist. Not by a danged sight, I ain’t. If a little kid burns his fingers on a red-hot stove and keeps away from the fire from that time on, you don’t call him a pessimist. That’s me—burnt to a caution.
All the Harper tribe, as far back as I can figure out, was cautious. We bred more runners than we did fighters. Of course there ain’t as many of us as there is Smiths. Smiths predominate, as it were. Anyway, the Smith tribe ain’t got nothin’ to do with this.
I ain’t been in Piperock for several weeks. Me and “Dirty Shirt” Jones has been prospectin’ back in the Whisperin’ Creek hills, with our usual good luck—of gettin’ back before all our food was gone. And we finds my pardner, “Magpie” Simpkins, settin’ at the table in our shack, wearin’ his Sunday clothes.
Magpie is so danged tall that it takes him all day to find out whether a certain pain is indigestion or inflammation of the kneecaps. He’s solemn, Magpie is. And when that elongated, pious-faced cross between a scientific lecture and a — fool statement gets pouches under his eyes and droops his eyelids like a blood-hound—caution cometh to me.
Magpie is writin’. He’s got ink plumb to his elbow and the floor is plumb littered with paper. Does he welcome us effusively? Like — he does. He just looks at us, kinda reprovin’-like, as if we should ’a’ knocked.
“Well, you old cattywampus, howdy!” greets Dirty Shirt.
Dirty has one eye that kinda oscillates, as it were. Not bein’ what an astronomer would call ‘a fixed orbit,’ it does a lot of jigglin’ before it picks up what Dirty’s lookin’ at.
But it don’t noways affect Dirty’s aim, bein’ as he shoots with both eyes open, and most of the time with both legs workin’. Magpie looks him over solemnly and says—
“Mr. Jones, I give you good afternoon.”
Dirty spits in the general direction of the stove.