Текст книги "The Ballad of Dingus Magee"

Автор книги: David Markson

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“Yes sir,” Dingus said.

He debated selling the watch, and went so far as to ask a jeweler about it, but the jeweler told him it had never been worth very much to begin with. And the cousin had left nothing pawnable either, save perhaps for the old anatomy book. Dingus took that to one of the doctors.

“I really ought to keep it for a souvenir,” he told the man, “since cousin Magee were so generous and kind in all the years, even to giving me one third of what we earned when all I done were the digging part. But I jest got to have some money.”

But the book was out of date. “Why not wait a few days,” the doctor suggested, “until the next time I hear about a burial, and then you could—”

“I still can’t lift them,” Dingus said, “being only eleven years old. I’d have to have a mule again, and then if I broke another leg I’d be in a real—”

“Borrow mine,” the doctor insisted. “Yes, do. Because I’d hate to have it on my conscience that I hadn’t assisted the nephew of a colleague. It can’t be too long, and then you would have the full twenty dollars for—”

“How much?” Dingus said.

“Twenty dollars. What I always paid Magee. You’re new at it, of course, but I’d be willing to pay the same amount that—”

“Oh,” Dingus said. “Well, I appreciate that, I truly do. Where’d you say you kept that mule again?”

“Just out in back. But you can’t simply go dig up any old thing, you know. The specimen has to be only recently interred, or—”

“I jest heard of one,” Dingus said. “From yesterday evening, Tuesday, which ain’t even twenty-four hours, and—”

“But who was—?”

“Feller named McNutt,” Dingus said, already turning out. “I’ll have him back here soon’s it turns dark.”

The next cousin was crazy, Dingus saw that immediately, although he could not have said precisely how. She was about forty, quite gray, and her skin was oddly colorless also, the hue of wet cardboard. She lived in an enormous old house, not her own, built in the Mexican style with linked, contiguous rooms facing an open inner courtyard, and before his arrival she had been completely alone.

But it wasn’t that. Nor did he mind the prayers either, to which she woke him the first morning and which he learned he was expected to endure each evening as well, in dumb formal ritual not before any altar or image but in the unroofed garden itself, under the sky. “It is not God,” the cousin said. “It is nature – the trees, the stars, the flowers – the all-embracing, transcendental oneness of things.”

“Yes’m,” Dingus said. “Nor do I speak words when I kneel,” she added. “I merely commune.”

“Yes’m,” Dingus repeated.

So it took him a few days, and then he had to go to a keyhole to find out. It was wine. She had a bottle in her hand which she was just opening. When he went back to the door two hours later she was removing the cork from a second one.

Her name was Eustacia. He did not know what she lived on, and she complained repeatedly of poverty. “Moreover it costs a pretty penny to feed an extra mouth,” she informed him, “although I do it gladly, out of a sense of the transcendental oneness of earth’s creatures. I merely hope that you appreciate it.” Frequently she had visitors, a group of anonymous and undifferentiated women of her own age and of an equal drabness who came singly or in clusters to sit for an hour. They were all unwed.

Like Magee, this cousin gave no thought to sending him to school either, although she finally did remark something she felt ought to be contributed to his up-bringing. This was just after he had gone to bed of an evening, perhaps at nine o’clock. He had not yet reached his fourteenth birthday. The cousin came into the doorway, considering him dubiously from beneath an upraised lamp. “I believe it is time you became cognizant of the facts of life,” she said.

“What’s them?” Dingus asked sleepily.

“Miss Grimshaw has volunteered to explain.” Miss Grim-shaw was one of the drab ladies, although Dingus could not have said which, even after the several years. Certain of them were teachers, and he expected her to appear with a book. But it was the cousin, Eustacia, who reappeared first, carrying a bottle of the wine instead. “Drink this,” she told him.

“Drink it?” Dingus said.

“Drink it all,” she insisted.

So when he awakened the next morning he still could not have said which one was Miss Grimshaw. “That’s quite all right,” the cousin said, “Miss Youngblood has volunteered to give you some further instruction tonight.”

It went on for a year or so. More often than not it occupied six nights in each week also, since there were six of the drab ladies in all. “I hope you appreciate my efforts,” the cousin said. “Above and beyond the financial difficulties, it is by no means easy for a maiden lady to bring up a young boy and be certain he is being educated as he should.”

“I’m most grateful,” Dingus said.

And then this cousin died also. It happened suddenly, one Sunday morning. Or perhaps it had been Saturday night, since she was already stiff when Dingus found her. She lay sprawled before a chiffonier with her fingers locked about the neck of an unopened bottle of chablis. It took Dingus an hour or two to rid himself of his hangover (the drink had become as much a habit as the drab ladies by then), and then he made use of his earlier training to dispose of the body himself, in the overgrown courtyard. He even knelt briefly in the usual place, if a little uncertain about precisely to whom he was commending her pantheistic spirit. “Anyways,” he said, “she put herself to considerable sacrifice on my behalf, and I hope she gets to be part of the transcendental oneness of things.”

He found the address of a third cousin, someone named Redburn Horn, in one of her drawers, and, surprisingly, he also came upon some four hundred dollars in cash. The first stagecoach for Santa Fe, where Horn lived, was not due to leave Galveston until Tuesday morning.

So he was still in the house on Monday evening when Miss Grimshaw appeared. “Eustacia died,” Dingus said.

“Oh,” Miss Grimshaw said. “Oh, I’m dreadfully sorry.”

“She were generous and kind.”

“Yes, Pm sure. And now you’re all alone.”

“I’m gonter go to Santa Fe. I got one further cousin.”

“Oh. But you’re not leaving tonight, are you? I mean, since I’m already here, and it ismy night, and—”

“Well,” Dingus said, “I reckon if you made a special trip—”

She was gone in the morning, but he found the note on his table. It didn’t occur to me until I was ready to leave,it said, that I’d always settled with Eustacia herself the poor dear. But I might as well pay you directly this time. The ten dollars is beneath the vase on the dresser. Sincerely, (Miss) Felicia Grimshaw.

Cousin Redburn Horn turned out to be a poor substitute for a mother also, although this time the difficulty did not lie entirely with the man himself. He was a morose, dis-grunded widower in his early forties who sold and repaired leather goods for a living, and did not always make that. He had been left with four daughters, the oldest of whom was a year younger than Dingus, and the family lived in three cluttered, disarrayed rooms behind Horn’s shop. The man was arthritic, and he wore thick spectacles, and he talked idly about a dream of returning to the East. “Be hard to keep you,” he told Dingus gloomily, “even if Christian charity demands it.” Otherwise he rarely spoke at all, nor did he ask Dingus to help him in the shop (there was not enough work anyway). Dingus buried the four hundred dollars in an old sock, behind the woodpile.

So it was the oldest daughter, Drucilla. It took a while, because when Dingus reached Santa Fe she was scrawny yet, and anyway she ignored Dingus almost as completely as did Horn himself, either out of some ingrained familial shyness or perhaps simply because the dreariness which pervaded the household was contagious. In the beginning Dingus could not have cared less. He went his own way, and before he was fifteen he had taken to drifting into odd jobs at the nearby cattle ranches.

And then Dingus fell in love. He did not know how it happened, and on this particular occasion he had been away only four months, on a cattle drive to the Kansas railheads. But she had blossomed. Maybe it was her hair, which for the first two years had been severely braided but now hung unbound about her pink shoulders. Yet there seemed to be new flesh everywhere he looked also, and her breasts were suddenly indubitable. Within days Dingus was doing his utmost to lure her into the darkness of the leather shop after hours.

She finally hit him with an adze. “You stink of cow,” she informed him.

“What’s wrong with that? It’s what I been riding behind the backsides of, is all.”

He took a bath nonetheless, but that did not help either. “Because there just isn’t anything romantic about you,” she said.

He still did not understand, so she finally showed him the cuttings. She had a hatbox full of them, newspaper accounts and artists’ sketches of General George Armstrong Custer, Captain W.J. Fetterman, Buffalo Bill Cody. “But that’s loco,” Dingus insisted. “All they done, they shot Injuns, and the true fact is, most of’em got kilt theirselves in the process. Why, that Custer weren’t nothing but a mule-sniffing, boastful, yeller-haired fool that dint have the sense to wait on the rest of his troops and got massacred for it, and anyways, you know darned well there ain’t a hos-tile Injun within ten days of here no more. The few tame ones there is, they’re jest on reservations. So how kin anybody go out and—?”

But Drucilla merely shrugged. So he had to do something. Because if it had been love before, within another month it was chronic desperation (worse, she bathed often, and he had discovered a peephole into the shed where they kept the tub). He owned a cow horse of his own, and a fourth-hand Remington revolver. When he saw her actually frame a portrait of Custer and then sigh wistfully as she nailed it above her bed, he saddled up and rode off.

The nearest reservation was two days away. He had about twenty dollars in his pocket, and he stopped the first dozen Indians he saw, asking where he might purchase old scalps. But most of them were Navajos and Pueblos who had never been belligerent to start with (some of the former tried to sell him blankets instead). One dispossessed old Zuñi finally told him the Spanish missionaries had long since confiscated all such distasteful trophies anyway.

So he had given up on it and was about to return home, disconsolately leaving the encampment by a different trail from the one he had followed coming in, when he noticed the Comanche wigwams. There were half a hundred of them, isolated and curiously forbidding, even somehow defiant in their withdrawal. Here and there an idle brave (they were all displaced from northern Texas) watched his passage with an expression openly truculent, and others looked up with similar unfriendliness from parched, unregenerate cornfields. It could have been his imagination, but Dingus hesitated to speak to any of them. Yet it struck him that love might find a way after all.

He waited in a secluded ravine until after dark, and then he slipped back on foot, making his way toward a wigwam before which he had seen a tall somber brave with a knife scar slashed the length of one cheek and the mark of an old bullet wound in his shoulder. “Because if’n the durned preachers done skipped confiscating souvenirs from any heathen in the territory,” he told himself, “I’d bet me a whole cash dollar it’s gonter be that gent right there.”

The camp was silent, and a new moon was obscured by racing low clouds. Mongrel dogs prowled amid the wickiups but without barking, far too accustomed to abuse. There was no sound from within the selected wigwam itself.

Dingus knew that if any scalps were in fact to be found, they would be hanging decoratively from the tent’s ridgepole. With infinite caution, feeling ahead of himself, he crept within and toward it.

Then he stopped dead. His lifted hand had come to rest upon something quite warm, quite soft. It was more than human flesh, it was a portion of human anatomy that Dingus would not have needed cousin Magee’s old textbook to recognize. He had been peeping at Drucilla’s, daily. Before he could withdraw, sleepily, yet reponsively, even more than responsively, a voice muttered, “Again,White Eagle?”

Dingus kissed her. The question had been rhetorical anyway, a hand was already groping unmistakably. Hastily shedding his clothing, disguising his voice in a dull whisper, Dingus said, “Wait. Jest one second now, and I’ll—”

So when she had at last commenced to snore peacefully again, while Dingus still struggled to collect himself, something else moved elsewhere in the wigwam. First Dingus heard a rustling of garments that were decidely not his own. Then the woman said, “What?Oh, now look, you raunchy old ramrod, how many times in one night do you think I—?”

Dingus had never reached the ridgepole. In fact he had lost his bearings completely, and now, fumbling anxiously in search of his pants, he stumbled into something standing behind him. He sprang away as it went over with a sound of crockery smashing. After that he was on his feet and sprinting.

But the brave was up also by then, and Dingus was unable to dodge the hand which snatched at him from behind; it took hold even as he plunged through the entrance. The moon emerged at that same instant. So they confronted one another for the moment as if frozen by the very flood of light itself, Dingus in his woolens with their rear flap commencing to tear where the brave gripped it, half turned away, and the brave himself even more starkly unclothed and with the nature of his interrupted indulgence even more stark than that. At first there was only puzzlement on the Indian’s face. Then, still grasping the hatch of Dingus’ drawers, but with the look turning to one of immemorial indignation now, like some great castrated beast the brave began to bellow. “A paleface! Not even one of those horny Mexican missionaries, but a paleface! In my own—”

But the flap finally gave. Already moving, as if his feet for that matter had not once ceased to move, Dingus plunged back within the tent and then scampered out again at its farther side, uprooting stakes and tearing wildly at skins as he wormed frantically through. The woman screamed, and the camp came alive as if under assault. Only the moon saved him, disappearing miraculously as quickly as it had appeared, while Dingus dove headlong behind stacked corn.

But no one was chasing him after all. Instead, the brave continued shouting where he stood, yet almost inarticulately for the moment so that the others seemed to be gathering about him more in curiosity than anything else, braves and women likewise, in their own assorted conditions of undress or interruption. And Dingus was still too much concerned with his own predicament to be startled at the fluency of the man’s English either, once he became coherent again, especially since the brave was brandishing a gleaming Winchester rifle over his head now too. “That’s it!” he cried. “That’s it! The end, the absolute, fornicating end! Because they drove us from the hunting grounds of our ancestors, and we suffered that in silence! Because they gave us treaties from the Great White Father, and then they took our new lands as well, and we endured that likewise! Even when we’ve had nothing to eat but buffalo flop, we have accepted. But now an end! An end, I say! Because when they will not even let a man have his bim-bam in peace, I tell you it is time for revenge.*”

He did not go back to Santa Fe immediately. As a matter of fact he stayed away for most of a week, knowing he would do so even as the Comanches mounted up and thundered from the reservation that same night, and so by the time he did return all of the dead had been safely buried, although certain of the larger buildings continued to smoulder. Cousin Redburn Horn himself had taken an arrow in the thigh, and although it was healing without complication the man was more anxious than ever now to return to the East. A cavalry patrol had long since been dispatched to hunt down the unpredictable renegades.

“And where were you?” Drucilla asked him. “Here when you finally might have had a chance to be a hero, you were off moping in the hills someplace.”

“Well, it ain’t my fault if’n I ain’t lucky,” Dingus said. “Anyways, looks to me like being a hero ain’t no more than being in the wrong place at the right time, is all.”

“Not that it matters to me one way or the other, actually,” the girl said then, “since personally I couldn’t care less about these banal Indian disturbances. It’s really quite prosaic, you know.”

“Huh?” Dingus said. “But what about all that there romance, and—”

“Oh, there’s only one sort of truly romantic individual left in the contemporary West, obviously. I’m collecting different cuttings now.”

She showed him a few. So this time it was even worse. “Jesse James?” he groaned. “Billy the Kid? But all they do, they rob things; is that what you mean? And for crying out loud, I heard a feller talking about Jesse one time, knowed him personal, and he told it for a true fact that he’s got granulated eyelids. Now what in thunderation is romantic about a feller blinks all the time?”

“If you don’t know, there’s simply no help for you,” Drucilla said with disdain, clipping a biography of the late James Buder Hickok from an old issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.Which left Dingus no less frustrated than before (the peephole had been filled in during his absence, also). Agonized, he scowled over her new collection until he knew many of the reports by heart. Finally he rode out again.

It took him months to muster the necessary courage. What he had in mind was a stagecoach waystation he had passed once, with a strong box too heavily padlocked not to hold something worth removing. He had to ride for some days, and his initial miscalculation should have been a sign. Because he planned to hole up in a mountain pass a short distance from the station and wait for dark, but when he reached the spot on a cloudless, sweltering midsummer day, it was well before noon. He was forced to perch on a flat rock for the necessary nine hours. When he unbent himself back into the saddle his horse took two sideward steps and fell dead.

“Not that it comes to much difference anyways,” Dingus decided philosophically. “Because how is Harper’s New Magazineor anybody else gonter know what a notorious desperado you are less’n some writer feller happens to walk in and catch you at it?”

The dilemma appeared insoluble. Nor had it altered on the afternoon months later when, quite by chance on a trail near Alamogordo, Dingus happened upon a stagecoach that had been attacked by unquestionably professional outlaws, and recently enough so that one injured horse still thrashed in the harness. Broken baggage was strewn about the roadway. The driving team and their four passengers lay face down in a gully, where they had been lined up and murdered. Dingus was horrified at the spectacle.

So he had just put the injured horse out of its misery, and was preparing to bury the victims, when something else caught his eye. Kicking at an embankment in its efforts to rise, the trapped animal had etched a deep, circular marking with its hoof, very like the letter D.Dingus wet his lips, gazing at it.

There was no sound on the trail. Save for the vultures which hovered ominously above, there was no movement either. A small, sharply pointed twig actually lay at his feet, as if in conspiracy. Dingus was holding his breath. Then, snatching up the twig at last, and with furtive, darting glances about himself, hurriedly but clearly he left his portentous message in the dust: Dingus Billy Magee done this. Beware.

Two weeks after that, in a town called Pendejo where he himself was a total stranger, he overheard gossip about another crime altogether, as yet unsolved. But by then he had been waiting with gleeful impatience to stumble upon just such a situation. The Pendejo sheriff had been shot in the back. “When’d it happen?” Dingus asked casually. “Jest last night sometime,” a waiter told him. Dingus himself had reached the town not an hour before. He nodded sagely. “Might have figured,” he said, “since I passed Dingus Billy Magee on the trail out of here this morning.”

“Dingus whoozy what?”

“Well now, you fellers jest must be behind the times up here, I reckon,” he informed them blandly. “Why, ifn there’s a more disreputable, underhanded, back-shoorin’, poorhouse-robbin’ skunk in the whole New Mex territory, it’d be news to most folks. Yep. What I hear, this Dingus Billy Magee, he cuts the gizzard out’n law officers on sight sometimes jest from plain cantankerousness. That’s Dingus, d-i-n-g-u-s—”

So it took scarcely any time at all after that, and when he started back to Santa Fe again, perhaps three months later, there was already well over two thousand dollars in rewards on his head, and his name was being spelled reasonably also. “Which even Juicy Drucy is gonter have to admit ain’t bad a-tall, for a shaver not even yet nineteen,” he speculated satisfactorily. He had taken to offering physical descriptions of himself on recent occasions also, inventing the red-and-yellow fringed Mexican vest by way of embellishment, and that too had been mentioned in several accounts of his exploits. Shortly before he reached home it occurred to him that he might actually purchase one.

So Drucilla had never heard of it, of the famous garment or of any of the rest, apparently. “Because I never read the newspapers any longer,” she said contemptuously. “Why, no respectable girl would have any interest in violence and bloodshed, which is all they ever print these days, of course.”

Dingus gaped at her. “But all them cuttings you—”

“When one ceases to be a child, one puts aside childish things. I should like to marry a pillar of the community now, a banker perhaps. Yes, indeed, nothing but a banker will do.”

“A what?Well, I’ll be mule-sniffing son of a—”

“Cousin William, please. Your language!”

So he endured that for a week or two and then he asked her how much it would cost to buy a bank, or open one. “Oh, I imagine it might be managed for sixty or eighty thousand dollars,” she informed him, “since I would only be interested in a respectable sort of bank, naturally.”

“Sixty or eighty thousandsDingus screamed. “Lissen, I got four hundred,in a sock I buried one time, and that’s the—”

And then suddenly it came to him. She was in the kitchen, sweeping, and he literally dragged her into the yard. “All right,” he said. “Yes. But wait now. Jest wait, a month or so maybe, because it ain’t gonter be that easy. But there’s got to be the sixty, maybe even more. Because it’s been ten years, at least, that she’s been salting it away, and—”

“Who?” Drucilla said. “What are you—?”

It was Belle Nops. Dingus did not know her except casually, since he had stopped at the bordello only rarely in his wanderings as a trailhand. But he had heard the speculation among her more regular clients often enough, and now his mind began to glow with the possibilities. “Because at a dollar a hump for all them years it’s got to be a unadulterated fortune,” he said. “And on top of that there’s the profits from the drinking and the gambling likewise. And it’s all jest sitting there, in that safe which fellers says is in her office, and which—”

“But I still don’t know what you’re—”

“You jest start cogitating on exactly where you want that bank to be,” Dingus said, “and I’ll be back here in less’n a month.” He did not explain further, already leading his horse from the barn. “Oh, yes, indeedy,” he told himself, saddling up. “And it’s been getting on time I went and done me some honeststealing, anyways.”

But it wasn’t a month. Nor was it two or even three. He tried flattery first, but this did not even get him into the bedroom, the office. “Because you lissen here now, Sonny,” Belle Nops told him, “I nominate my own jockeys, and I ain’t so saddle-wore that they’re about to be snotty twerps wet behind the ears yet, neither. Anyways you’d rattle around like a small dipper in a big bucket.”

“But I knowed me a right smart of older ladies,” Dingus protested, “and they’d speak admiringly of me, too. Why, you jest write a brief letter of inquiry to Miss Felicia Grimshaw, over to Galveston, say, or Miss Youngblood in the same—”

“I just this morning hired on a unplucked little thirteen-year-old from Nogales,” Belle told him, “down the hall in the end room. Three dollars cash money, you can do the first-night honors.”

So then he stole a key and tried rape. What he had in mind, of course, was an eventual intimacy that would lead to his presence on an occasion when the safe was opened. But he had never been exceptionally strong, nor did he weigh as much as a hundred and forty pounds, and she outwresded him easily each time. He had been jumping her from behind the door. When he changed his tactics and did not materialize from within her closet until she stood stripped to her garters, she finally got mad enough to heave him bodily down the rear staircase.

Dingus sprained a wrist. But if he had to give up on it for a time after that, he finally did commit one actual crime while nursing the injury in a sling. He was not sure how much educational value the experience offered, the victim being an acquaintance. Too, he had intended appropriating the man’s derby hat only; the slightly moist eight hundred dollars from within it was sheer happenstance.

When a new strategy at last did occur to him, it was based on the theory that recumbency would be half the battle. So this time he waited outside the bordello entirely until he believed she would be asleep. Then he made use of his key, undressed soundlessly, and slipped into her elusive embrace.

Some weeks after that, when he was two days away from being hanged, he complained moderately to Hoke Bird-sill. “Least you might have done,” he said, ^t6y ^oucould of wore that there new sheriff’s star on your woolens, I reckon, so a feller’d know jest who it were he was about ready to violate.”

But even after he had talked Hoke into letting him escape, simultaneously appropriating the latter’s reward money as an afterthought, the sense of his unfulfilled mission continued to plague him. It had become a matter of more than Drucilla and their bank; there was a man’s pride. Yet in his next two attempts he did not even reach the bordello itself, what with Hoke lying in wait for him behind it.

Dingus supposed he could not blame Hoke for a certain annoyance, though as a matter of truth the man’s intrepidity puzzled him. “Maybe I oughter of added it where Johnny Ringo and the Dalton brothers involved with Mister Earp in the valiant story of how I got my wrist wounded that time,” he speculated. When Hoke put a bullet through the loaned-out vest for the second consecutive time, Dingus concluded the project could wait again after all. He decided he might as well add Hoke’s three thousand eight hundred dollars to the four hundred in his sock at Santa Fe.

But he was still some distance away, curled foetally into his blankets on a chilly night west of the Pecos, when he had a new educational experience altogether. He had no opportunity to flee as the two men appeared, since they materialized so unexpectedly in the flickering glow of his campfire, and so soundlessly, that for an instant he almost believed it a dream. In fact the first thing he saw was the naked bore of the sawed-off shotgun itself, as it was thrust beneath his chin. “One move and you’re deceased,” he was told.

But then he was less afraid of being murdered intentionally than of having it occur by accident, since the man covering him was so nervous that the shotgun commenced to tremble unconscionably in his hands, pointing into Dingus’ left eye one instant, his navel the next. Nor was the second thief any more composed. Snatching up Dingus’ weapons, he dropped each of them at least once before managing to scatter them beyond reach in the mesquite.

Then, abruptly, constellations exploded inside Dingus’ skull. So the conversation which followed seemed dreamlike also:

“Great gawd amighty, what did you clobber him for?”

“Well, will you jest look! All that there cash! I thought he’d be jest some cowpuncher on the trail, prob’ly, but this critter is very doubtless a outlaw hisself I mean a authentic one, and—”

“Well, it’s too late now, since we got it half took anyways”

“Oh, I jest knew it! I jest knew we’d git our fannies stomped on. Because now he’s likely to hunt us down fer revenge, or—”

“Well, we still got to take it Because we been intending at least one gen-u-ine daring deed fer years now, instead of jest writing to them newspapers, and this has got to be it I’llget the horses.”

“Shouldn’t we oughter bind him up, maybe? I mean it, Vm right scared, Doc– “

“Let’s jest get the b Jesus out of here fast, Wyatt—”

Then he had one further lesson to muse upon when he reached Santa Fe itself, since Horn’s leather shop was already boarded up when he got there, and cousin Redburn and his three younger daughters were in the very process of loading a wagon with what appeared to be the totality of their household effects. Nor was Drucilla herself anywhere in evidence. Cousin Redburn glanced at Dingus as if he had been absent no longer than a matter of days. “Come into a bit of cash currency,” he announced matter-of-factly, “so I’m heading back East like I always wanted. Real windfall it were, I do admit.”

“What?” Dingus said. “Cash? Lissen, you didn’t happen to go and find no four hundred dollars in a old sock out back in the—?”

“Well say, ain’t it a coincidence that I done jest that! But how on earth would you happen to of guessed it, Dingus?”

“How? Only because it’s my own durned last-remaining money, is all. How else do you think, you mule-sniffing old—”

“I don’t reckon you could prove that, could you, nephew? A notorious outlaw like you turned out to be? Now who do you think would accept your word against that of a respectable, hard-working shopkeeper who done took you in one time out’n Christian decency, and you jest a poor waif of an orphan then too?”