quilt on top of it, and the father and a little boy sitting on the seat and the marshal trying to make them get out of town.
“It’s a public street,” the man says. “I reckon we can stop to buy something same as airy other man. We got the money to pay for hit, and hit ain’t airy law that says a man can’t spend his money where he wants.”
They had stopped to buy some cement. The other son was in Grummet’s, trying to make Grummet break a sack and let him have ten cents’ worth, and finally Grummet broke the sack to get him out. They wanted the cement to fix the fellow’s broken leg, someway.
“Why, you’ll kill him,” the marshal said. “You’ll cause him to lose his leg. You take him on to a doctor, and you get this thing buried soon as you can. Don’t you know you’re liable to jail for endangering the public health?”
“We’re doing the best we can,” the father said. Then he told a long tale about how they had to wait for the wagon to come back and how the bridge was washed away and how they went eight miles to another bridge and it was gone too so they came back and swum the ford and the mules got drowned and how they got another team and found that the road was washed out and they had to come clean around by Mottson, and then the one with the cement came back and told him to shut up.
“We’ll be gone in a minute,” he told the marshal.
“We never aimed to bother nobody,” the father said.
“You take that fellow to a doctor,” the marshal told the one with the cement.
“I reckon he’s all right,” he said.
“It ain’t that we’re hard-hearted,” the marshal said. “But I reckon you can tell yourself how it is.”