Josh looked rather startled. Did this young gentleman mean to beat him, and all because he had put a hornet’s nest under a silly colored girl’s bed? Josh had received many a licking from his raw-boned mother, and when Aunt Mandy whipped, she whipped. He was not afraid of the physical hurt of a beating, but that line of English ancestors of which Lewis had spoken all rebelled in this, their little descendant, against being beaten by any one who was no blood kin.
“March!” said Lewis.
Well, if he were to go to execution like a soldier, he could stand it better. With flashing eyes and head well up, Josh walked on by Lewis’s side.
The camp builders had fashioned, with great ingenuity, a shower bath to one side of the kitchen and store-room under the pavilion. The mountain spring was dug out into a very respectable reservoir, and this was piped down to furnish running water in the kitchen and a strong shower in this rough lean-to of a bath-room. The water was cold and clear and the fall was so great that the spray felt like needles. The young men reveled in this vigorous bathing and the Carter girls had taken a go at it and one and all pronounced it grand.
Josh looked upon this enthusiasm on the subject of mere bathing as affectation. Miss Somerville might have had the same attitude of mind towards persons who liked Limberger cheese or read Sanskrit for pleasure.
Lewis directed his prisoner to this bath-house.
“Anyhow, we uns ain’t gonter git licked befo’ the niggers,” thought Josh with some satisfaction.
“Now take off your clothes,” said Lewis sternly.
So he was more thorough than his mother. She contented herself with tickling him on his bare legs, and if the black snake whip could cut through the thin rags he called clothes, all well and good. Josh never remembered her having tackled him in a state of nature. He made no demur, however. If this, his idol, chose to beat him naked, he could do it. He hoped he would draw the blood just so he, Josh, could show these people from the valley how a mountain boy could take what was coming to him without a whimper.
He dropped the ragged shirt and trousers that constituted his entire clothing and stood before the avenging hero, a thin, wiry little figure about the color of a new potato that has but recently left its bed.