“It was tacked up on my corn-crib. I seed it from the kitchen window yesterday mornin' 'fore breakfast. I went out an' pulled it down.”
Hoag had never attempted a more fragile sneer. “An' you let a puny thing like that scare you out o' your socks,” he said, flamboyantly.
Purvynes's hat-brim went down and his eyes were not visible to the desperately alert gaze of his companion. “I can take my own medicine, Cap,” he answered, doggedly, “but I can't manage women. They read the thing 'fore I could hide it, an' you know what excited women would do at the sight of a sheet like that. My wife's been ag'in' our doin's all along, anyway.”
Hoag perused the sheet again, his putty-like lips moving, as was his habit when reading.
“How do you reckon,” he glanced at the drawn face beside him, “how do you reckon they got on to me as—as the main leader?”
Purvynes was quite sure he could answer the question. “Nape Welborne's gang give it away. They've been braggin' right an' left about how Nape forced you to back down that night. They've been drunk an' talked 'fore black an' white like a pack o' fools.”
“But from this,” Hoag tapped the fence with the folded sheet, “it looks like the nigger that wrote, this thinks I am still the head.”
“An' so much the worse,” Purvynes moaned, and he clutched the fence nervously as if to steady himself. “You an' me an' all us old members has to suffer for the drunken pranks of them young roustabouts. When they shot up nigger-town last week, an' abused the women an' children, the darkies laid it at our door. In fact, that is the cause of this very move. It was the last straw, as the sayin' is. They've got plumb desperate, an' when niggers work underhand they will resort to anything. It's quar, as my wife says, that we never thought they might turn the tables an' begin our own game.”
Hoag shrugged his shoulders, but made no comment. His shaggy brows had met and overlapped. His eyes had the glare of a beast at bay.
“My wife thought”—Purvynes evidently felt that the point was a delicate one, but he made it with more ease than he could have done on any former occasion—“she thought maybe your boy Henry might have got onto you an' talked reckless, but if he did, Cap, it was some time ago, for the boy ain't like he used to be. He's more serious-like. I got it straight from one o' the gang he used to run with that he's really quit his old ways an' gone to work.”