Inside the railing, she picked up a heavy iron cuspidor, and walked over to the table where, earlier in the morning, the district attorney had sat.
“He’p me up on dis here table, honey!” she grunted, hugging the heavy cuspidor in her arms.
The district attorney lay unconscious under the table on which Ginny stood.
Ginny announced her position by a loud bellow. She raised the large iron cuspidor above her head with her fat arms, and every pound of her monstrous weight was quivering with unspeakable hate.
“Git outen my way, Hitchie!” she whooped. “Gimme room accawdin’ to my fat, sonny! Let yo’ mammy put somepin acrost!”
For more than a minute Sheriff Flournoy had been fingering his pistol, waiting for a chance to shoot without killing Hitch Diamond. Ginny Babe Chew’s remarkable stunt gave him pause and caused him to lower his gun with astonishment.
Hitch reeled and stumbled backward. His eyes were glazing, his right arm hung broken and useless at his side, he was one bloody mass of wounds.
Dinner Gaze, his clothes torn from him until he was bare to the waist, his whole body screaming with pain from countless injuries, slowly followed Hitch in his retreat, chopping at him with weakening arms, still fighting with the broken table-leg.
“Look up, Dinner Gaze!” Ginny Babe Chew bawled. “Dis is yo’ la-ast time to see de hoodoo face!”
Unconsciously responding to the command, Dinner Gaze raised his pain-shot eyes upward, and looked into the fat face, through whose rolls of flesh two green pig eyes gleamed upon him with a serpent’s venom and deadly malignity.
The heavy iron cuspidor came down with a crash. It crushed the criminal’s head like an egg-shell. It bounced, fell on its rounded edge, and rolled slowly across the floor.
Dinner Gaze fell face downward, kicked the floor three times with the toes of his shoes, and died.
Then she held out a fat hand to the slim young girl standing beside the table and said:
“Gimme yo’ hand an’ he’p me down offen dis table, honey! Dis here duck is too dang fat to be roostin’ so high!”
The panic and outflow of negroes from the trial chamber in the Tickfall courthouse started a riot-call in the town.
A clerk in the Gaitskill store across the street ran over and tolled the courthouse bell ten times. In response, every white man in Tickfall dropped his task, armed himself, and came with all possible haste to the court square.