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"You talk like Arbuckle used to talk," Haggin censured. "Manny's
the time I've heard him string it off. Poor old Arbuckle. The most
sure and most precautious chap that ever handled niggers. He never
went to sleep without spreadin' a box of tacks on the floor, and
when it wasn't them it was crumpled newspapers. I remember me well,
bein' under the same roof at the time on Florida, when a big tomcat
chased a cockroach into the papers. And it was blim, blam, blim,
six times an' twice over, with his two big horse-pistols, an' the
house perforated like a cullender. Likewise there was a dead tom-cat.
He could shoot in the dark with never an aim, pullin' trigger
with the second finger and pointing with the first finger laid
straight along the barrel.
"No, sir, my laddy buck. He was the bully boy with the glass eye.
The nigger didn't live that'd lift his head. But they got 'm. They
got 'm. He lasted fourteen years, too. It was his cook-boy.
Hatcheted 'm before breakfast. An' it's well I remember our second
trip into the bush after what was left of 'm."
"I saw his head after you'd turned it over to the Commissioner at
Tulagi," Van Horn supplemented.
"An' the peaceful, quiet, everyday face of him on it, with almost
the same old smile I'd seen a thousand times. It dried on 'm that
way over the smokin' fire. But they got 'm, if it did take fourteen
years. There's manny's the head that goes to Malaita, manny's the
time untooken; but, like the old pitcher, it's tooken in the end."
"But I've got their goat," the captain insisted. "When trouble's
hatching, I go straight to them and tell them what. They can't get
the hang of it. Think I've got some powerful devil-devil medicine."
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