“Wall, now, stranger, if you choose to be resarved, and we choose to be free-an’-easy, where’s the differ? We’ve a right to have our own customs, and do as we please as well as you, I guess.”
“Hear, hear!” cried Abel Jefferson, commencing to rock himself again, and to smoke more violently than ever. “What say ye to that, mister?”
“Only this,” answered Ned, as he put the finishing touches to his sketch, “that whereas we claim only the right to do to and with ourselves what we please, you Yankees claim the right to do to and with everybody, else what you please. I have no objection whatever to your spitting, but I do object to your spitting over my shoulder.”
“Do you?” said Sam Scott, in a slightly sarcastic tone, “an’ suppose I don’t stop firin’ over your shoulder, what then?”
“I’ll make you,” replied Ned, waxing indignant at the man’s cool impudence.
“How?” inquired Sam.
Ned rose and shook back the flaxen curls from his flushed face, as he replied, “By opening the door and kicking you out of the hut.”
He repented of the hasty expression the moment it passed his lips, so he turned to Jefferson and handed him the drawing for inspection. Sam Scott remained seated. Whether he felt that Ned was thoroughly capable of putting his threat in execution or not we cannot tell, but he evinced no feeling of anger as he continued the conversation.
“I guess if you did that, you’d have to fight me, and you’d find me pretty smart with the bowie-knife an’ the revolver, either in the dark or in daylight.”
Sam here referred to the custom prevalent among the Yankees in some parts of the United States of duelling with bowie-knives or with pistols in a darkened room.