Kinsard, restive under the interpolation, seized the opportunity to resume. “There is no pretense of justification for adopting formal resolutions to asperse the oath of an honorable man, least of all at the instigation of his avowed personal enemy. The story we have heard is at its worst merely a country boy’s ‘taking up a dare.’ I will venture to say that there is not a man within the sound of my voice who has not had similar affrays,—has not in the days of his youth ‘taken up a dare,’ has not fought by appointment.”
“Will the member explain what he means by a duel?” demanded Harshaw. He did not turn his big yellow head; he only cast his opaque blue eyes at Kinsard, and once more looked down at his hands clasped on his desk.
For a moment Kinsard, taken unaware, was checked.
“Perhaps the member had best begin at the beginning, and define a challenge,” suggested a satiric voice from the rear.
There was a sharp call to order from the chair, and Kinsard, rallying himself, went tumultuously on.
“I am not a dictionary,” he proclaimed angrily. “I am not here to enlighten your ignorance.”
Harshaw, elated by the allusion to the old question of the challenge, intimating anew a flocking to his standard, interrupted cleverly: “I have a dictionary right here,—a law dictionary.” He read aloud, “Dueling is the fighting of two persons, one against another, at an appointed time and place, on a precedent quarrel.”
Kinsard vociferously claimed the floor, although it had become very evident to the House that the interest he advocated fared hardly less severely at the hands of its friend than its foe. In debate he was no match for the wily Harshaw,—his natural endowments, his enthusiasms, his finer emotions, succumbing to a practiced logic, and a militant habit, and an instinctive discernment of the vulnerable point.
“It is impossible to seriously maintain that a fight between a couple of country boys is a duel,” he vehemently insisted. “Everybody knows that the common acceptation of the idea of a duel is a combat between men—men of station” (Harshaw leaned forward with an air of mock attention, placing his hand ostentatiously behind his ear)—“on some question of honor, fighting under the control and direction of their seconds, at a specified number of paces, and with pistols”—
“Enactment provides that they shall be silver-mounted, hair-trigger?” sneered Harshaw.