Adding that to Dirk Tracy's guess that he was from
Jackson's Hole, the sum spelled outlaw.
The Muleshoe boys were careful not to seem curious about
Bud's past. They even refrained from manifesting too much
interest in the musical instruments until Bud himself took
them out of their cases that evening and began tuning them.
Then the half-baked, tongue-tied fellow came over and gobbled
at him eagerly.
"Hen wants yuh to play something," a man they called Day
interpreted. "Hen's loco on music. If you can sing and play
both, Hen'll set and listen till plumb daylight and never
move an eyewinker."
Bud looked up, smiled a little because Hen had no eyewinkers
to move, and suddenly felt pity because a man could be so
altogether unlikeable as Hen. Also because his mother's face
stood vividly before him for an instant, leaving him with a
queer tightening of the throat and the feeling that he had
been rebuked. He nodded to Hen, laid down the mandolin and
picked up the guitar, turned up the a string a bit, laid a
booted and spurred foot across the other knee, plucked a
minor chord sonorously and began abruptly:
"Yo' kin talk about you coons a-havin' trouble--
Well, Ah think Ah have enough-a of mah oh-own--"
Hen's high-pointed Adam's apple slipped up and down in one
great gulp of ecstasy.
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