“Fight! fight! in D-5s back office!” and here came the whole town to see the fun.
“I command the peace!” yelled Dick Locks; “I'm the mayor.”
“And I'm the hoss for you!” screamed I, doubling him up with a lick in the stomach, which he replied to by laying me on my back, feeling very faint, in the opposite corner of the room.
“I command the peace!” continued Dick, flinging one of the combatants out of the window, another out of the door, and so on alternately, until the peace was preserved by nearly breaking its infringers to pieces.
“What in the devil, Mr. Tensas, does this mean?” said my preceptor, who at that moment came in; “what does all this fighting, and that drunken Indian lying in your bed, mean? have you all been drunk?”
“He has poisoned himself, sir, in my absence, with the solution of arsenic, which he took for whiskey; and as all the doctors were out of town, I called in the students, and they got to fighting over him whilst consulting;” I replied, very indignantly, enraged at the insinuation that we had been drinking.
“Poisoned with solution of arsenic, ha! ha! oh! lord! ha!” and my preceptor, throwing his burly form on the floor, rolled over and over, making the office ring with his laughter—“poisoned, ha! ha!”
“Get out of this, you drunken rascal!” said he to the dying patient, applying his horse-whip to him vigorously. It acted like a charm: giving a loud yell of defiance, the old Choctaw sprang into the middle of the floor.
“Whoop! whiskey lour! Injun big man, drunk heap. Whoop! Tubba big Injun heap!” making tracks for the door, and thence to the swamp.
The truth must out. The boys had got into the habit of making too free with my preceptor's whiskey; and to keep off all but the knowing one, he had labelled it, “Solution of Arsenic.”