"You better run, Sam," he jeered.
"You'll be pretty scared when I shoot her off, I guess."
"Well, why don't you SEE if I will? I bet you're afraid
yourself."
"Oh, I am, am I?" said Penrod, in a reckless voice--and his
finger touched the trigger. It seemed to him that his finger no
more than touched it; perhaps he had been reassured by Sam's
assertion that the trigger was difficult. His intentions must
remain in doubt, and probably Penrod himself was not certain of
them; but one thing comes to the surface as entirely
definite--that trigger was not so hard to pull as Sam said it
was.
BANG! WH-A-A-ACK! A shattering report split the air of the
stable, and there was an orifice of remarkable diameter in the
alley door. With these phenomena, three yells, expressing
excitement of different kinds, were almost simultaneous--two from
within the stable and the third from a point in the alley about
eleven inches lower than the orifice just constructed in the
planking of the door. This third point, roughly speaking, was the
open mouth of a gayly dressed young coloured man whose attention,
as he strolled, had been thus violently distracted from some
mental computations he was making in numbers, including,
particularly, those symbols at ecstasy or woe, as the case might
be, seven and eleven.
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