Pitman did. He took the bucket, raised it to his mouth, drank most of it off, then lowered it to peer over its rim at Coke. “What news?” he rasped. Then he saw the basket Coke had set down. His eyes went wide and he reached.
Coke picked up the basket in one hand and helped Pitman rise with the other. “Here, man. Let us get you out of the sun.”
The two of them made a halting progress to some shade. The yard, which had gone near silent while Coke freed his friend, now burst into noise again, with cries, with pleadings, with laughter and drunken song from the prison tavern they collapsed before. Someone within it was tuning a fiddle.
Pitman ate two of the small, bitter apples whole, stem, core and all, and tucked the third apple within his rags. He chewed every scrap of meat from the ham h
