The Ballad of Dingus Magee Read Free

even if them soljers never done—especially since he were forced to study on it every day when you was his prisoner that once, until you escaped on him and he vowed he’d git you.”
    “Aw, that’s only old Hoke.”
    “That mean it’s true what they say?”
    “Depends what they say, most like.”
    “That you and Hoke Birdsill was supposed to be real tender poontang-sharing chums but then he turned to being a lawman and you turned to being a desperado and so he’s gonter gun you down because it don’t look right, a lawman having a feller like Dingus Billy Magee for a old poontang-sharing chum—that true?”
    “Hoke still says that, that him and me was fond chums?”
    “What I hear,” Turkey said.
    “Me and Hoke Birdsill,” Dingus considered. “Well now, you mean to say I dint never tell you how it come about that Hoke got to telling folks what dear chums we was?”
    Turkey said nothing, but he had brought his horse almost to a standstill. For a moment Dingus gazed off into space, privately amused. “Old Hoke,” he said then. “Oh, I knowed him a little, here and yon, I reckon, but never no more than saying howdy, you understand? And then some time goes by, and there was a couple of them piddling rewards on me by then—back a spell, hardly nothing much more than several thousand dollars all told, maybe—and Hoke had got hisself a badge by then likewise. So one day I’m on the prod over this way, and I break a cinch on my saddle. Weren’t nothing, but while I’m getting her fixed I hear this other horse, and when I look up, darned if’n it ain’t old Hoke. Well, now. So he sits there a time, and I stand there a time, and then he says, ‘Howdy, Dingus,’ and so I say, ‘Howdy, Hoke.’ And then he says, ‘I got to arrest you, I reckon.’ Well, that were his poor misunderstanding, you see, only he dint know that yet, because there was the small matter of I’d heard him before he’d seed me—so what am I holding onto behind my horse but this here difficulty-equalizing old shotgun.” Dingus stroked the weapon as they moved, chuckling. “Well, old Hoke. He gets around to where he notices that, finally, and he turns the color of a shoat’s belly, I reckon. ‘Now, Hoke,’ I say then, ‘you wasn’t truly gonter arrest me, was you?’ ‘Now, Dingus,’ Hoke says. ‘You was jest tasting that there reward money, wasn’t you, Hoke?’ I ask him; ‘you was right hungry for it, wasn’t you?’ ‘Now, Dingus,’ Hoke says. Then round about that time I notice that jest under where Hoke is sitting his horse, there’s a mule or a burro been there first, you see, and it’s left a reminder. All heaped up higher’n a small boy’s first arising, and right fresh too. So I inform old Hoke, ‘Hoke, I’ll tell you what. You being so hungry, you climb on down and eat, then.’ Well, poor Hoke. A man’d do pretty near anything in this old world to stop a shotgun from going offin the very nearby vicinity of his stomach, I reckon. But wouldn’t you know—right about then, darned if’n that weren’t when the loopy-nozzled critter took to informing folks how good he knowed me. Yep. ‘Do I know Dingus Billy Magee?’ old Hoke would say,’—whyjest a short spell back, Dingus and me, we ate chow together—’”
    That might have been four o’clock. Roughly two hours later, into dusk, Turkey found out what he had been waiting for. For most of the two hours he had been concentrating on it deliciously, the anticipation gripping him like a mustard plaster. And then when it happened it was typical that for a moment he was thinking about something else altogether.
    They had just turned aside from the road itself, to follow a little-used trail behind the town’s first dilapidated outlying miners’ shacks, when this other thing occurred to him. It stiffened him in the saddle. “Yerkey’s Hole!” he cried. “I plumb forgot.”
    Dingus came huddling along hatless after him. “What’s that?” he asked.