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It's more the thirst that's killing me. I feel as if liquid fire was coursing through my veins. If you believe there be any chance of finding water, go, Walt." "I'll do so; but don't you sturve in the meanwhile. Cook the critter afore lettin' it kim to thet. Ye've got punk, an' may make a fire o' the sage-brush.
Almost in silence they climbed down the old trail, edged across the bridge, and strode with a steady pace up the long six miles over the Point to their home. "What's 'salting a mine, Tony?" asked Job of the black hostler one day a week after. "Doan' know, Marse Job, unless it's doctoring the critter so you can make somebody believe it's worth a million, when it ain't worth a rabbit's hind foot.
"I shall hanker arter the critter some, but he's a-gettin' too big to be handy; 'n' it's one comfort abaout critters, you ken get rid on 'em somehaow when they're more plague than profit. But folks has got to be let alone, excep' the Lord takes 'em; an' He don't allers see fit."
I went out on purpose to see a steer-roping contest, on the ranch of a man by the name of Gilbert, I remember. A cowboy they called Pete carried off the honors; had his 'critter' down and tied in forty-two seconds. They told me that was slow time, but I thought it lightning itself." "The trick can be done in thirty-five with the wildest," commented Ben.
They was makin' a lot of talk abaout haow they'd trim us to-morrer. They gut my blood to b'iling, and I told 'em a few things. That critter, Silence, begun to give me the laugh. He said us fellers made a lot of talk, but we didn't have sand to back it up. Dod bim him! I guess I showed him I had sand!"
Mocking shouts followed after them, pistol-shots, even the scraping of a fiddle and shuffling on the ledge. But they kept on, cursing across the river and back to Daddy Marcum, who was standing in the porch, peering for them through the dawn, with a story to tell about Isom. "The critter was teched in the head," the old man said, and this was what the Braytons, too, believed.
"I say, Jim," said the old guardsman, who felt that he was speaking to the boy he had known for thirty odd years, "where on airth did you pick up sich a sickly lookin' critter?" "I didn't pick her up," replied the farmer laughingly. "I married her fair and square just as you did your wife a hundred years ago, more or less. Haven't I as good a right to get married as you had?"
The deakin looked him over in a don't-care kind of a way, an' didn't 'parently give much heed to what I was sayin'. Finely I says, 'Wa'al, what do you think of him? 'Wa'al, he says, 'he seems to be a likely enough critter, but I don't believe he'd suit Mr. White 'fraid not, he says. 'What you askin' fer him? he says.
"He wan't no feller critter," said Daddy, indignantly, "he was nothin' but a liquor-seller: the wust kind tu, fur he knowed just what mischief he wus a doing to the human race. Yes, and to the brute race tu, fur I've seen men whallop their hosses nigh about tu death when they was in liquor."
To see that critter come like a turkey out of a bag at Christmas, to be fired at for ten cents a shot, was as good as a play; but to look round and see the poverty the half naked children the old pine stumps for chairs a small bin of poor watery yaller potatoes in the corner day light through the sides and roof of the house, lookin like the tarred seams of a ship, all black where the smoak got out no utensils for cookin or eatin and starvation wrote as plain as a handbill on their holler cheeks, skinney fingers, and sunk eyes, went right straight to the heart.
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