Colonel Meredith, seeing Arthur about to embark on his mission, offered help and comfort in the emergency.
"Just you wait till I fetch my rifle," he said; "and if there's any trifling, we'll shoot them up."
"Shoot them up!" exclaimed Arthur. "If we shot them up, we'd go from here to prison and from prison to the electric chair."
"In South Carolina," Colonel Meredith protested, "if a man comes on our land and we tell him to get off and he won't, we drill a hole in him."
"And that's one of the best things about the South," said Arthur. "But we do things differently in the North. If a man comes on my land and I tell him to get off and he says he won't, then I have the right to put him off, using as much force as is necessary. And if he is twice as big as I am and there are three or four of him, you can see, without using glasses, how the matter must end."
"Then all you are out for is to take a licking?"
"That is my only privilege under the law. But I hope I shall not have to avail myself of it. Where there are so many tents there must be money. Where there is money there are possessions, and where there are possessions, there are the same feelings about property that you and I have."
"Still," said Colonel Meredith, "I wish you'd take me along and our guns. There is always the chance of managing matters so that fatalities may be construed into acts of self-defense."
"Get behind me, you man of blood!" exclaimed Arthur, laughing, and he leaped into a canoe, and with a part of the same impulse sent it flying far out from the float. Then, standing, he started for the brown tents with easy, powerful strokes, very earnest for the speedy accomplishment of a disagreeable duty. That anything really pleasant might come of his expedition never entered his head.
"Arthur gone to put them off?"