“At ’em—fight ’em!� shouts another, brandishing a big stick.
“Let’s lay ’em out! thrash ’em!�
“Hold on! Halt!� cries Captain Ethan with the voice of a trumpet and he springs to the front of his little troop and faces them, his arms aloft with a kind of impassioned dominance of voice and mien that hustles back the pell-mell advance.
“Halt! Form in line!� he calls, and the wild crowd sway into a kind of half-circle about their captain.
“Three cheers for Hennepin County and the Gun!� orders the captain.
Shout, shout, shout. Oh, how they shouted! That wild hurrah rifted the clouds and shook the mountains. Then as the echoes died away, in the sharp interval of silence that followed, Captain Ethan faced around to the enemy:
“Now, gentlemen, what will you have?�
“Three cheers for Ogden County!� returned the leader.
“Ogden County—without the Gun, amen!� piped up Eph like a fife.
But the three cheers were lustily given. The old Vermont hills echoed and re-echoed again, and a vast deal of spleen spent itself in those six cheers.