“Nothin’, only I’m much obleeged to you for this black bottle—_here’s luck!_—you can charge the price in the next bill of costs you git agin me.” The discomfited Sheriff could stand this jeering from the Captain no longer, so he put spurs to his horse and left. “Now,” murmured Suggs, “let me depart in peace, for thar’s no chance to ketch up with me now!—Cuss the hole—and yonder’s a horsin’ log! “Well, the wicked flee when no man pursueth; wonder what they’d do if they had that black rascal, Martin Ellis, after ’em, on that infernal long-legged bay? Durn the luck! thar’s that new saddle that I borrowed from the Mississippi feller—which he’ll never come back for it—_that’s_ lost in the mill creek!—jist as good as ten dollars out of my pocket. Well, it’s no use ’sputin’ with providence—hit _will_ purvide! “The Grand Jurors of the State of Alabama,” he continued, soliloquizing in the verbiage of an indictment; “elected, sworn, and charged—_darned rascals all, with Jim Bulger at the head!_—to inquire for the body of Tallapoosa County—_durn their hearts! it’s_ MY _body they’re after!_—upon their oaths present—_confound them!_—that Simon Suggs—_hem! that’s me, but they might’ve put the ‘Captain’ to it, though!_—late of said County—_just as if I warn’t one of the fust settlers, which I was here, afore they had a sign of a Court-House!_ “Well, it’s no use thinkin’ about the lyin’ thing; I’ll have to go Hadenskeldt, at Court, to get me out’n the suck. Now, _he’s_ a quar one, ain’t he? Never got him to do any law job for me yet but what I had to pay him—drot the feller. Anybody would think ’twas as hard to git money from me as ’tis for a man to draw a headless tenpenny nail out’n an oak post with his teeth—but that little black-headed lawyer makes a _ten_, or a _twenty_, come every pop! “Wonder how fur ’tis down to the bend? This creek makes into the river about a mile below it, they say. Never mind, thar’s a few drinks of the _ipsydinxy_ left, and the menajerie won’t open to-day. I judge if my old woman knowed _whar_ I was goin’, and _who_ I was goin’ to see, she’d make the yeath shake. But she don’t know; it’s a prinsippel that Providence has put into the bosom of a man—leastways all sensible men—to run on and talk a heap afore their wives, to make ’em believe _they’re turnin’ wrong-side out before ’em_ and yet never tell ’em the fust word of truth. It’s a wise thing in providence, too. Wonder, if I’ll ketch that rascal Jim Sparks jewlarkin’ round Betsy, down at old Bob’s!”