laughed harshly. “I reckon you are mistaken about that. I reckon you are mistaken about that. I sold out to you, as you yourself expressed it, ‘lock, stock and barrel.’ There isn’t even a ramrod left to sell.”
“You’ve got it; and we’uns want it. ‘Take the money,’ says Missis Garvey, ‘and buy it fa’r and squar’.’”
Goree shook his head. “The cupboard’s bare,” he said.
“We’ve riz,” pursued the mountaineer, undeflected from his object, “a heap. We was pore as possums, and now we could hev folks to dinner every day. We been reco’nized, Missis Garvey says, by the best society. But there’s somethin’ we need we ain’t got. She says it ought to been put in the ’ventory ov the sale, but it tain’t thar. ‘Take the money, then,’ she says, ‘and buy it fa’r and squar’.’”
“Out with it,” said Goree, his racked nerves growing impatient.
Garvey threw his slouch hat upon the table, and leaned forward, fixing his unblinking eyes upon Goree’s.
“There’s a old feud,” he said distinctly and slowly, “’tween you ’uns and the Coltranes.”
Goree frowned ominously. To speak of his feud to a feudist is a serious breach of the mountain etiquette. The man from “back yan’” knew it as well as the lawyer did.
“Na offense,” he went on, “but purely in the way of business. Missis Garvey hev studied all about feuds.
