"I'd sooner die as not to see one!" sighed Philip.
"I aim to see one when I'm a perfessor," remarked Taulbee.
"I bet I see a hundred when I go to be a soldier," said Nucky.
"I'd ruther see a railroad-train as to eat!" declared Geordie, and this appeared to be the prevailing sentiment, except with Keats, who said dismally that he didn't crave to see anything that would take him fifty mile' from Nervesty and home. After reflection, Hen agreed with him.
"Listen at them two homesicks!" remarked Philip, cuttingly.
Geordie folded his fat hands. "Now you might tell about your paw gettin' kilt," he said.
Killis said that the officers had been spying around on his "paw" a long time for "stilling" liquor, but that he was too smart for them, and moved the still about, and made liquor by night, and also frightened them by sending word to the marshal he would never be taken alive. That one night they had just "drug" the still up to a new place in the hollow, and he and his father and uncles were sitting around the fire, when there was a yell, and the marshal and a deputy burst in, shooting as they came. That his uncles returned the fire, but before his father could do so, he fell, with a dreadful wound through the stomach. That he himself, when he saw his father fall, snatched a hunting-knife and cut the marshal in the forearm with it as he was running out.
The last item he told without bragging, and quite as a matter of course. The other boys gave him looks of approval and envy, all save Nucky. "By Heck, I wouldn't have stopped with his arm," he declared.
"I haint," replied Killis, quietly.
Evidently I have two heroes on my hands!