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Updated: May 31, 2025
"He's been warn in' me, boys," he called. "That devil has the range like he was sitting in a rockin' chair shooting at a tin-can. He's warnin' us back to the rest of the gang. And damned if we ain't goin'!" It was quite patent that he was right, for three bullets sent on a line for one horse, and each of them closer, could mean only one thing.
He made it gang, bump bump, an' the soond was just like a cradle rockin'. Ye could hardly believe sic a thing would hae made that din, but it did, an' ye see we lay in our beds hearkenin' for't. Ay, when Eppie telt me, I could scarce believe 'at that guid devout-lookin' man could hae been sae wicked. Ye see, when he found hoo terrified we a' were, he keepit it up.
We hadn't got no spare room in that house; there was the kitchen in front, and mother's bed-room, and the buttery, and the little back-space opened out on't behind. Mother was in the bed-room; so, while I called her, Miss Perrit set down in the splint rockin'-chair that creaked awfully, and went to rockin' back and forth, and sighin', till mother come in.
Now 'tis all to do again, an' he hides his face in his hands. "'So that's it, I sez, shakin' him again. 'That's th manin' av your disobeyin' ordhers. "'I dare not kill meself, he sez, rockin' to and fro. 'My own hand wud not let me die, and there's not a bullet this month past wud touch me. I'm to die slow, he sez. 'I'm to die slow. But I'm in hell now, he sez, shriekin' like a woman.
An' me livin' on an' kapin' clear av clink, not by my own good conduck, but the kindness av some orf'cer-bhoy young enough to be son to me! Do I not know ut? Can I not tell whin I'm passed over at p'rade, tho' I'm rockin' full av liquor an' ready to fall all in wan piece, such as even a suckin' child might see, bekaze, "Oh, 'tis only ould Mulvaney!"
Despite this blemish, however, when the camp gets so it knows him it can't he'p but like him a heap. He's so quiet an' honest an' ignorant an' little an' lame, an' so plumb p'lite besides, he grows on you. I can almost see the weasened old outlaw now as he comes rockin' into town with his six or seven burros packed to their y'ears with pelts!
"Do you care partic'larly where you set, nights, Ossian?" inquired Mrs. Popham, who was now in a state of uncontrolled energy bordering on delirium. "Because your rockin' chair has a Turkey red cushion and it would look splendid in Mr. Thurston's room. You know you fiddle 'bout half the time evenin's, and you always go to bed early."
And then they say she fainted dead away, and fell over the rockin' chair, he not bein' near enough to ketch her. And he brung her to on a burnt feather that fell out of the chair cushion when she fell. There wuz a small hole in it, so they say, and the feather oozed out. I don't tell this for truth, I only say that they say thus and so.
I try not to think about my husband, any more than I can help, because I couldn't work, if I did, and I've got to work. It's most helpful to think the Lord made special promises to widows, and when I remember Him I a'n't afeard." Miss Perrit stopped rockin' a minute, and then she begun to creak the chair and blow her nose again, and she said,
For there I wuz a settin in my own rockin' chair and there opposite me sot my own Josiah a whittlin', for the "World" hadn't come, and he wuz restless and ill at ease, and time hung heavy on his hands.
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