“Not me! I had half a cigar once; Dirk Peterson dared me. It was one of them wheelings, black, slick-lookin’ cigars. He and me an’ anuther boy’d gone to look at the nigger girls bathin’ and clod them—”
“Where on earth was that?”
“Vera Cruz.”
“Oh, and who was Dirk Peterson?”
“Son of an old feller that run a dridger in the harbor, Yankee, half-Dutch, hadn’t only one eye, and wasn’t more’n eleven, biggest liar from here to C’necticut. His face was all chawed up, and he said he’d got it like that and lost his eye fightin’ with a tiger. Confl’ent smallpox was what had done him, so Pap said; but the boys believed him till that day I was telling you of, he fetched out a half cigar he’d stole or picked up somewhere and a box of waxios and dared me smoke her—and I lit her up, like a durned fool!”
“What happened then?”
“Oh, lots of things,” said Jude. “First of all the harbor begun spinnin’, and then it went on till two tides more I’d have been inside out, when Dirk shouts to some chaps to come an’ look at Jonah tryin’ to bring up the whale. That got my goat, and I laid for him by the foot and brought him down and near beat the head off him. Then I got sick on him again, and he run home to his mother, with all the fellers after him wantin’ to know about that tiger.”
“He couldn’t fight?”
“N’more than a jewfish.”
“Have you had many fights with boys?”