The whole of my party rushed to the target, to have the evidence of their senses, before they would believe the report; but most marvellous fortune decreed that it should be true. Their incredulity and astonishment were most fortunate for me, for they blinded my hearers to the real feelings with which the exclamation was uttered, and allowed me sufficient time to prepare myself for making the best use of what I had said before, with a very different object.
“Second best!” reiterated I, with an air of despondency, as the company turned from the target to me; “second best, only! Here, Billy, my son, take the old soap-stick; she’s a good piece, but I’m getting too old and dim-sighted to shoot a rifle; especially with the drop sight and double wabbles.”
“Why, darn my buttons!” said Billy, with a look that baffles all description; “ain’t you driv the cross!”
“Oh, driv the cross,” rejoined I, carelessly. “What’s that? Just look where my ball is! I do believe, in my soul, its centre is a quarter of an inch from the cross. I wanted to lay the centre of the bullet upon the cross, just as if you’d put it there with your fingers.”
Several received this palaver with a contemptuous, but very appropriate, curl of the nose; and Mealy Whitecotton offered to bet half-a-pint, “that I couldn’t do the like agin, with no sort of wabbles, he didn’t care what.”
But I had fortified myself on this quarter by my morality. A decided majority, however, were clearly of opinion that I was serious; and they regarded me as one of the wonders of the world. Billy increased the majority by now coming out fully with my history, as he had received it from his father; to which I listened, with quite as much astonishment as any other one of his hearers. He begged me to go home with him for the night, or, as he expressed it, “go home with him, and swap lies that night, and it shouldn’t cost me a cent;” the true reading of which is, that if I would go home with him, and give him the pleasure of an evening’s chat about old times, his house should be as free to me as my own. But I could not accept his hospitality, without retracing five or six miles of the road which I had already passed; and therefore I declined it.
“Well, if you won’t go, what must I tell the old woman for you? for she’ll be mighty glad to hear from the boy that won the silk-handkerchief for her; and I expect she’ll lick me for not bringing you home with me.”
“Tell her,” said I, “that I send her a quarter of beef, which I won as I did the handkerchief, by nothing in the world but mere good luck.”
“Hold your jaw, Lyman,” said Billy; “I ain’t a gwine to tell the old woman any such lies; for she’s a rael, reg’lar built Meth’dist.”
As I turned to depart—