Brightly. What’s your rush? I can’t get ready as soon as that!
D’A. The state owns the right to my head and arm now. A quick blow, and an honorable, bloodless peace.
Hood. Well said, my boy. We fight our own countrymen, whose ancestors stood shoulder to shoulder with ours for the first independence. The first shot makes me shudder, for I cannot see the end.
D’A. War is cruel, and I have hoped against hope that it would not come.
Hood. I like your sentiments, my boy. May I hope a bullet may never find you. But the north will fight. It is the exasperation wrought by cruel pictures of the wrong we have carried as best we could, through the first century of the Republic.
Brightly. Now, gentlemen, don’t get melancholy. Yankees won’t fight. They are by instinct thieves and shopkeepers. I will bet you my best nigger you can’t hire one to cross the line.
Myers. I have travelled in that country some, and I will meet your wager and go you one better, that you smell as much Yankee gunpowder the next year as you can take care of.
Brightly. (Pointing to Myers, laughing.) It’s chronic, Johnny Bull!
Hood. Did I understand you that you are an Englishman?
Myers. An Australian, sir, on a spec, plying between Mobile and Havana. Got anything to sell?