It didn't sound
good. When a man breathes that way he's mostly all gone.
Well, it was really none of my business, as you might say. Men
got batted over the head often enough in those days. But for
some reason I picked him up and carried him to my 'dobe shack,
and laid him out, and washed his cut with sour wine. That
brought him to. Sour wine is fine to put a wound in shape to
heal, but it's no soothing syrup. He sat up as though he'd been
touched with a hot poker, stared around wild-eyed, and cut loose
with that song you were singing. Only it wasn't that verse.
It was another one further along, that went like this:
Their coffin was their ship, and their grave it was the sea,
Blow high, blow low, what care we;
And the quarter that we gave them was to sink them in the sea,
Down on the coast of the High Barbaree.
It fair made my hair rise to hear him, with the big, still,
solemn desert outside, and the quiet moonlight, and the shadows,
and him sitting up straight and gaunt, his eyes blazing each side
his big eagle nose, and his snaky hair hanging over the raw cut
across his head. However, I made out to get him bandaged up and
in shape; and pretty soon he sort of went to sleep.
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