again as if to bring his speech to the level of his hearers and give a
lazier and more deliberate effect to his long-drawn utterance.
"Well--no!" he said slowly.
"I--didn't--go--with--no--Bill--to--help--clear--the road!
I--don't--reckon--TO go--with--no--Bill--to--clear--ANY road! I've just
whittled this thing down to a pint, and it's this--I ain't no stage
kempany's nigger! So far as turnin' out and warnin' 'em agin goin' to
smash over a fallen tree, and slap down into the canyon with a passel of
innercent passengers, I'm that much a white man, but I ain't no NIGGER
to work clearing things away for 'em, nor I ain't no scrub to work
beside 'em." He slowly straightened himself up again, and, with his
former apathetic air, looking down upon one of the women who was setting
a coffee-pot on the coals, added, "But I reckon my old woman here kin
give you some coffee and whiskey--of you keer for it."
Unfortunately the young expressman was more loyal to Bill than
diplomatic. "If Bill's a little rough," he said, with a heightened
color, "perhaps he has some excuse for it. You forget it's only six
months ago that this coach was 'held up' not a hundred yards from this
spot."
The woman with the coffee-pot here faced about, stood up, and, either
from design or some odd coincidence, fell into the same dogged attitude
that her husband had previously taken, except that she rested her hands
on her hips. She was prematurely aged, like many of her class, and her
black, snake-like locks, twisting loose from her comb as she lifted her
head, showed threads of white against the firelight. Then with slow and
implacable deliberation she said:
"We 'forget'! Well! not much, sonny! We ain't forgot it, and we ain't
goin' to forget it, neither! We ain't bin likely to forget it for
any time the last six months. What with visitations from the county
constables, snoopin's round from 'Frisco detectives, droppin's-in from
newspaper men, and yawpin's and starin's from tramps and strangers on
the road--we haven't had a chance to disremember MUCH! And when at last
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