I was so completely horror-struck that I stood transfixed for a moment to the spot where the cry met me. The accomplices in the hellish deed which had been perpetrated had all fled at my approach; at least I supposed so, for they were not to be seen.
“Now, you old corn-shucking rascal,” said the victor (a youth about eighteen years old), as he rose from the ground, “come cutt’n your shines ’bout me agin, next time I come to the Court-House, will you? Get your owl eye in again, if you can.”
At this moment he saw me for the first time. He looked excessively embarrassed, and was moving off, when I called to him in a tone emboldened by my office and the iniquity of his crime:
“Come back, you villain, and assist me in relieving your fellow-mortal, whom you have ruined for ever!”
My rudeness subdued his embarrassment in an instant, and with a taunting curl of the nose he replied:
“You needn’t kick before you’re spurred. There ain’t nobody there, nor han’t been nother. I was jist seein’ how I could ’a fou’t.”
So saying, he bounded to his plough, which stood in the fence about fifty yards beyond the battleground.
And would you believe it, gentle reader, his report was true? All that I had heard and seen was nothing more or less than a Lincoln rehearsal, in which the youth who had just left me had played all the parts of all the characters in a Court-House fight.
I went to the ground from which he had risen, and there were the prints of his two thumbs plunged up to the balls in the mellow earth, about the distance of a man’s eyes apart, and the ground around was broken up, as if two stags had been engaged upon it.