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A few minutes later the coach drew up at the "Summit House." Yuba Bill did not dismount, an unusual and disturbing circumstance that brought the bar-keeper to the veranda. "What's up, old man?" "I am." "Sworn off your reg'lar pizen?" "My physician," said Bill gravely, "hez ordered me dry champagne every three hours." Nevertheless, the bar-keeper lingered. "Who's that you're dry-nussin' up there?"
"He has always been oppressed and kept down by colonists of the Latin races; he has been little better than a slave to his oppressor for the last two centuries," said Senor Perkins, with a slight darkening of his soft eyes. "Injins is pizen," whispered Mr. Winslow to Miss Keene.
"An' yit," continued the cripple, earnestly, "ef thet old-time war ever busts loose afresh hit'll make these hyar numerous small streams, in a manner of speakin', run red with men's blood an' salty with women's tears, too, I fears me. I've done dream't of a time when all thet pizen blight would be swep' away from ther hills like a fog an' I sought ter gain yore aid in hastenin' thet day.
The moccasins and the white nightgown were the sum and substance of her apparel, and the cowpunchers stood up around the table to admire her spunk. "Damed near spat pizen," observed Ben Swann, "when I hung into her tried to bite me, but the minute I got her in my hands she quit strugglin', as reasonable as a grown-up, by God!" "Shut up, Ben. Don't you know no better'n to cuss in front of a kid?"
This yere prejudice agin profanity is the only thing about this yere Peg-leg that ain't pizen bad, an' that prejudice, you got to know, was just along o' his being loco on that one subjeck. 'Twa'n't as if he had any real principles or convictions about the thing. It was just a loco prejudice. Just as some gesabes has feelin's agin cats an' snakes, or agin seein' a speckled nigger.
"Look at the pretty pattern on its skin." "Pretty!" snapped the man beside her. "When you live in Arizona you never see any beauty in a rattler. He's just plain pizen to everybody. There ought to be a reward offered fer every snake killed. Then maybe they could be exterminated." The girls were glad to get back into the automobile again, out of the glaring sun.
His companion also altered his attitude by dropping his other foot to the floor, sitting up, and leaning lazily forward with his hands clasped. "Look yer, colonel. When you took this place, I felt I didn't have no call to tell ye all I know about it, nor to pizen yer mind by any darned fool yarns I mout hev heard. Ye know it was one o' them old Spanish haciendas?"
"Seems 'most as if you don't enj'y talkin' business with me," observed the Cap'n, with a meek wistfulness that was peculiarly aggravating to his grouchy partner. "I'd about as soon eat pizen!" stormed the other. "Then let's not do it jest now," the Cap'n returned, sweetly. "I've got something more important to talk about than stumpage.
He says that if ye look up anny poplar dhrug in th' ditchnry ye'll see that it is 'A very powerful pizen of great use in medicine. I took calomel at his hands f'r manny years till he told me that it was about the same thing they put into Rough on Rats. Thin I stopped. If I've got to die, I want to die on th' premises.
"Well, I've been askin' folks about him some, since, and I've found out that him an' Miss Polly hain't been friends for years, an' that she's been hatin' him like pizen owin' ter the silly gossip that coupled their names tergether when she was eighteen or twenty." "Yes, I remember," nodded Old Tom. "It was three or four years after Miss Jennie give him the mitten and went off with the other chap.
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