“What I like about you, Black Bart,” resumed L’Olonnois, naively, “is, you seem always fair.”
I flushed at this, suddenly, and pushed back my plate. “Jimmy,” said I at last, “I would rather have heard that, from you, than to hear I had made a million dollars from pearls or anything else. For that has always been my great hope and wish—that some day I could teach myself always to be fair—not to deceive anybody, most of all not myself; in short, to be fair. Brother, I thank you, if you really believe I have succeeded to some extent.”
“Why ain’t you always jolly, like you was havin’ a good time, then?” demanded my blue-eyed inquisitor. “Honor bright!”
“Yes.”
“Then I will tell you. It is because of the first chapter of Genesis, Jimmy.”
“What’s that?”
“Fie! Fie! Jimmy, haven’t you read that?” He shook his head.
“I’ve read a little about the fights,” he said, “when Saul ’n’ David ’n’ a lot of ’em slew them tens of thousands. But Genesis was dry.”
“Do you remember any place where it says ‘Male and female created He them’?”