"I did take you, suh, for a gentleman. I find I am mistaken. And you refuse to go, and"—
"Yes!" roared Klutchem, his voice splitting the air like a tomahawk.
"Then, suh, let me tell you right here that if you do not get up now and get into my caarriage, whenever you can stand on yo' wuthless legs, I will thresh you so, suh, that you will never get up any mo'."
[Illustration]
CHAPTER IX
A Visit of Ceremony
The Honorable I. B. Kerfoot, presiding judge of the district court of Fairfax County, Virginia, and the gallant Major Thomas C. Yancey, late of the Confederate army, had been the colonel's guests at his hospitable house in Bedford Place for a period of six days and six nights, when my cards—two—were given to Chad, together with my verbal hopes that both gentlemen were within.
My visit was made in conformity with one of the colonel's inflexible rules,—every guest under his roof, within one week of his arrival, was to be honored by a personal call from every friend within reach.
No excuse would have sufficed on the ground of flying visits. And indeed, so far as these particular birds of passage were concerned, the occupation was permanent, the judge having taken possession of the only shake-down sofa on the lower floor, and the warlike major having plumped himself into the middle of the colonel's own bed not ten minutes after his arrival. Even to the casual Northern eye, unaccustomed to the prolonged sedentary life of the average Virginian when a guest, there was every indication that these had come to stay.
Chad laid both of my cards on the table, and indulged in a pantomime more graphic than spoken word. He shut his eyes, laid his cheek on one hand, and gave a groan of intense disgust, followed by certain gleeful chuckles, made the more expressive by the sly jerking of his thumb towards the dining room door and the bobbing up and down of his fore-finger in the direction of the bedroom above.