Mr. Briggles did not run after him. He stood staring at the child. "I don't want that boy," he said. "I don't want him. I couldn't do anything with that boy. He's a cripple!"
Buddy, stopping at the head of the incline, gazed, wide-eyed from one to the other.
Didn't anybody want a boy that was lame? "I got _one_ good foot," he said boastingly. And suddenly Mrs. Potter's strong, work-muscled arms gathered Buddy up and held him close to her breast, so that one of the sharp buttons of her coat made him shake his head and forget the angry tears he had been ready to shed.
"I want him!" she cried, her eyes blazing. "I'll take him, you--you--"
No one knew what she would have called Mr. Briggles, for with an unexpectedness that made Mr. Briggles's teeth snap together George Rapp shut an iron hand on the back of his neck, and bumped a knee into Mr. Briggles from behind so vigorously as to lift him off his feet. With the terrible knee bumping him at every step, Mr. Briggles was rushed down the incline with a haste that carried him entirely across the street and left him gasping and trembling against a tool box alongside the railway tracks. George Rapp returned wiping his hands in his coat skirts as if he had just been handling a snake, or some other slimy creature.
"Now we got done with pleasure," he said with a laugh, "we'll talk business. Do you want that colt, or don't you, Mrs. Potter?"
THE county jail stood back of the courthouse, on Maple Street, and was a three-story brick building, flush with the sidewalk, with barred windows. To the right was the stone-yard where, when the sheriff was having good trade, you could hear the slow tapping of hammers on limestone as the victims of the law pounded rock, breaking the large stones into road metal. As a factory the prisoners did not seem to care whether they reached a normal output of cracked rock or not.
Seated on a folded gunny-sack laid upon a smooth stone in this yard, Booge was receiving justice at the hands of the law. He pulled a rough piece of limestone toward him, turned it over eight or ten times to find the point of least resistance, settled the stone snugly into the limestone chips, and--yawned. Eight or ten minutes later, feeling chilly and cramped in the arms, he raised his hammer and let it fall on the rock, and--yawned! The other prisoners--there were five in all--worked at the same breathless pace.