"He does—the skunk!" acquiesced Riley.
"Stop calling a honest citizen names," directed Shotgun Shillman. "Mr. Reelfoot is an upright man. I don't believe he'd rob a child or steal the pennies off a dead baby's eyes. I don't believe he would—if any one was looking."
Simon Reelfoot rode up, tied his horse on the lee of the building—he was always tender of his stock—and entered.
"Howdy," he said glumly. "Cold day."
"If you'd wear something besides that relic of the days of '61 you wouldn't find it such a cold day," observed the straightforward Shotgun.
At which allusion to his ratty old blue army overcoat Simon's upper lip lifted. It might almost be said that he snarled silently.
"Feller as poor as I am can't afford to buy buffalo coats," he declared in the grumbling rumble so oddly at variance with his build. For he was a little clean-shaven man, this Simon Reelfoot, with a hatchet face and the watery peering eyes of the habitual drunkard.
"Yeah," he grumbled, staring from one to another of the three officers with open disapproval. "I ain't got money to buy buffalo coats. I have to work to earn my living, I do. I ain't got time to sit on my hunkers around a hot stove come-day-go-day a-taking the county's money for doing nothin'."
"Which will be just about all from you, Reelfoot," Billy Wingo suggested sharply.
"Oh, you can't scare me," said Simon, shaking a lowering and dogged head. "I say what I think, and if folks don't like it they know what they can do."