Free The Amalgamation Polka by Stephen Wright Page B

jaundiced-cheeked, snaggle-toothed, scum-licking saucebox with a massy head and a wizened brain whose preposterous upright endeavors to pass as a man are incontestably betrayed by the bestial bouquet of his musk.”
    “I see you’ve given the matter some consideration,” Thatcher said dryly.
    “Really, Potter.” Roxana’s attention, as ever, focused firmly upon her mesmerized son. “I enjoy backcountry vulgarity as well as the next, but must we be so entertained at the dinner table?”
    Potter, now hunched mere inches away from his bowl, was slurping up soup with renewed abandon. “A puke is a puke.” He shrugged. “You can’t pretty ’em up.”
    “I wasn’t asking you to. I only wonder whether we might not finish our meal before being served the full particulars.”
    “Now, Roxie, darling, don’t start reefing the sail just yet. I’ve got a savory yarn to spin.”
    Slicing off half the joint for himself, the rambling wanton then proceeded between noisy, spewing chews and long drafts of cold cider to relate news of the latest atrocity from the Kansas Territory: the shocking execution of an innocent Free Soiler name of R. P. Brown by a marauding gang of border ruffians pleased to dub themselves the Kickapoo Rangers. Seems the previous day a no-account puke called Cook had been found brutally murdered by a person or persons unknown. Inflamed with drink highly rectified and unquenchable fancies of revenge, the fun-loving Rangers waylaid the first misfortunate who happened along, in this case the hapless Brown, who was hauled into Dawson’s grocery in Leavenworth prior to his trial for Cook’s murder. Ticktock went the clock on the wall, ticktock. Nerves among the abductors, already strained, began in that drafty, oppressively cramped room to fray and part.
    “Don’t you leer at me with such an unfettered eye.”
    “Heap o’ grit, ordering me around like that. Who was it pressed that ol’ gray you now prance about upon in such princely style?”
    “Speak one word more and I’ll twist that bandanna around your pipe till the lamps pop out of your ugly mug,” etc., etc., until attention turned inevitably to the bound prisoner.
    “Gents, hold on now. Why try a guilty man? Was Cook tried? Has a single one of them eastern punkinheads ever come within hailing distance of the bar of justice?”
    “But we got to try him,” someone suggested, “so we can decide how to kill him.”
    “Arguing about how to kill a skunk?” replied another, running a filthy thumb along the bright bit of his hatchet. “You can’t please a bastard.” Rising almost reluctantly to his feet, he raised the hatchet and with one powerful swing planted the blade deep into Brown’s cowering head.
    The Rangers watched like spectators at a dance as the bleeding man writhed painfully about on the sawdust floor. After a while someone said, “Reckon we better take him home.” So the groaning body was roughly tossed into a wagon bed and the Rangers, warming themselves on a demijohn of Old Monongahela, set off across ten frozen miles of the worst winter on record, when men went about draped in buffalo robes, their boots wrapped in burlap, and wild turkeys were so numbed by the cold they could be shot like targets with a pistol.
    “I am very cold,” complained Brown.
    “Here’s some coffee for you,” one of the boys declared, leaning over to deposit a fresh gob of tobacco juice into the open wound in Brown’s skull. “Liniment for a damned amalgamator.”
    Yet drawing feeble breath, the body was rudely dumped at the door of the man’s cabin with the cry to the horrified wife: “Here’s Brown!”
    Potter’s dark dancing eyes had become as still as baked pebbles. He was staring not just at but directly into Liberty, searching the boy’s gaping soul for points of recognition. “Those,” he intoned gravely, “were pukes.”
    “Do what you will,” Thatcher conceded. “The Territory is not Veracruz.”
    Roxana remained apart,