“Matter? Why, nothin', Nelson.” Baker laughed mechanically. “I was jest thinkin' that I ought to be in bed. I've told you all I kin, I guess.”
“You were so quiet just now that I thought—really, I didn't know what to think. I was telling you—”
“I know, Nelson.” Baker's unsteady hand was on the latch of the door. “Never you mind, I'll call on you if I want anything. I've got yore friendship, I reckon, an' that's enough fer me.”
He opened the door and glided out into the hall. “Good-night, Nelson.”
“Good-night, Pole, good-night. God bless you, old man!”
On the lonely road leading to his house the mountaineer stopped and drew the bottle from his pocket. “You dem little devil!” he said, playfully, holding it up before his eyes in the starlight. “Here I've gone all day in Atlanta, passin' ten 'thousand barroom doors, swearin' by all that was holy that I'd fetch Nelson Floyd his news with a sober head on my shoulders an' a steady tongue in that head; an' I rid, too, by hunkey, all the way from Darley out here with a hack-driver smellin' like a bung-hole, with two quarts under his seat an' no tellin' how many under his hide. I say I got through all that, although my jaws was achin' tell they felt like they was loose at the sockets, an' I 'lowed I'd slide safe to the home-base, when you—you crawled up under my nose in the dark like a yaller lizard, with that dern tale about yore ripe old age an' kingly flavor. 'Memento' hell!” Pole was using Floyd's word for the first time. “I'd like to know what sort of a memento you'd make outside of a man's stomach. No, Poley, I reckon you've reached yore limit.”
The mouse squeaked again. Pole chuckled. He held the flask aloft and shook it.
“Gentlemen,” he said to the countless stars winking merrily down from above, “take one with me,” and he drank.