“More of a one than you, anyhoy.”
“He thinks that shaving one’s mustache makes a Yankee!”
Jake turned white with rage.
“’Pon my vord, I’ll ride into his mug and give such a shaving and planing to his pig’s snout that he will have to pick up his teeth.”
“That’s all you are good for.”
“Better don’t answer him, Jake,” said Fanny, intimately.
“Oh, I came near forgetting that he has somebody to take his part!” snapped the presser.
The girl’s milky face became a fiery red, and she retorted in vituperative Yiddish from that vocabulary which is the undivided possession of her sex. The presser jerked out an innuendo still more far-reaching than his first. Jake, with bloodshot eyes, leaped at the offender, and catching him by the front of his waistcoat, was aiming one of those bearlike blows which but a short while ago he had decried in the moujik, when Bernstein sprang to his side and tore him away, Pessé placing herself between the two enemies.
“Don’t get excited,” Bernstein coaxed him.
“Better don’t soil your hands,” Fanny added.