.. yelling and shouting....

Then the game unaccountably shifted into seeing who could pull up the
most corn stalks, beginning at an equal marked-off space out in each row
and rushing back with torn-up handfuls....

The afternoon dropped toward twilight and everybody was as mellow as the
departing day--which went down in a riot of gold....

A great area of the field looked as if it had fallen in the track of a
victorious army, or had been fallen upon by a cloud of locusts.

A chill came in with twilight, and we built a fire, and danced about it.

I danced and danced ... we all danced and howled in Indian disharmony
... wailing ... screeching ... falling ... getting up again ... when I
danced and leaped the world resumed its order ... when I stood still or
sat down plump, the trees took up the gyrations where I had left off,
and went about in solemn, ringing circles ... green and graceful minuets
of nature....

"Here's to good old Gregory, drink 'er down, drink 'er down!" I heard
the boys, led by Jack Travers, bray discordantly.

"Want 'a hear some songs?" I quavered, interrogating.

"What kind o' songs?" asked a big, hulking boy that we called 'Black
Jim,' because of his dark complexion.

"Real songs," I replied, "jail songs, tramp songs, coacaine songs!"

All those Rabelaisan folk-things I had lost while hopping the freight,
came surging back, each not in fragments, but entire. Drunk, I did then
what my brain since, intoxicated or sober, cannot do ... I rendered them
all, one after the other, just as I had copied them down....

* * * * *

"And more! Gregory, more!" the boys kept shouting.

I sat down and began to cry because I had lost the script. It had all
gone out of my head again as quickly as it had come, so that I could not
even repeat one they'd asked for.

"Hell, he's got a crying drunk the first thing!"

"Cheer up, old scout ... here's another cupful."

"No ... I don't want any more ... I'm never going to drink again."

And I knocked the cup out of Travers' hand with a violent drunken sweep
of negation.

"No use getting huffy about it," someone put in belligerently.

"If anybody wants to fight," it was Black Jim, huge and menacing and
morose, advancing....

Fight! knives! jails!...

Ah, yes, I was still in jail ... and Bud and the burly cotton thief were
at it....

I staggered to my feet.

"Wait a minute, Bud ... I'm coming." I gave a run toward a barr