"Why, fiends and furies!" exclaimed the captain, "do you pretend, sir, to assert, that you did not lose three hundred naps to me?"
"Or that this acknowledgment for eight hundred was not given?"
The youth, astounded as he was, took the paper. It purported to be an I.O.U., but the forgery was clumsy.
"That is not my writing—nor do I owe either of you a sou."
The scene that followed may be imagined. Instant payment, or a legal security for the alleged debts was demanded—or the alternative—a meeting in the Bois de Boulogne within two hours. Half bewildered, the young dupe assented to give the latter—and at the time appointed he alighted, without friend or weapon, at the place named for the duel, by these infamous men.
Several other persons were on the ground, all strangers to the unfortunate young man. Another attempt was made to induce him to admit the debt of honor, and it was proposed that a reconciliation should take place between him and his former friend, the captain. To do them justice, the gentlemen unknown were ardent in their endeavors to accommodate the matter, and persuade the citizen to pay the money, and they were perfectly sincere in mediation on the occasion, for they were all members of the same dishonest clique. But nothing could shake the youth's determination to repudiate the infamous demand. Captain K——, irritated to madness at his total failure, demanded that the duel should instantly proceed—and the gang, as furious from the unexpected disappointment, determined to murder one who could not be persuaded to submit to bare-faced spoliation.
Never were two combatants more unequally opposed, than the young merchant and the desperate gambler—the one, probably, had never discharged a pistol in his life—the other, and within six months, had killed his man on the very spot the doomed youth was standing.
Other and fouler circumstances went to render the result of the impending duel almost a certainty. K—— fought with his own pistols—with the firing signal he was particularly familiar—his back was to the sun, and an open sky behind him. The scoundrel second, who had volunteered his services, placed the young Englishman in a position where the trunk of a large beech formed a leading line of fire, and the stream of sunshine through the vista in the trees, was almost blinding. To the intentional murderer and the intended victim, the loaded weapons were delivered—a preparatory word was spoken, the signal fell. K—— coolly raised his pistol, while, by a snap-shot, the flurried Englishman anticipated his executioner by a second. On that momentary advantage life or death depended. The bully, shot directly through the heart, fell on the sward, a dead man. While the bullet destined for the breast of his antagonist, cut the grass harmlessly at the foot of the fortunate survivor. Never was a thoughtless youth more providentially delivered by accident from certain murder—nor a scoundrel sent to his account so justly and unexpectedly as Captain K——.
In riding an hour after the affair had terminated in the forest, I met the body of the dead gambler on a stretcher, en route to the Morgue.
The decline of dueling, from the period it was made ancillary to swindling, or to the settlement of disputes between vulgar scoundrels, who could not lay the slightest claims to the title or privileges of gentlemen, has been rapid and progressive, and its gross abuse did more to remedy its own mischief, than moral appeals and legal enactments. What but disgust can be created against a system when prostituted to the purposes of sheer murder? When two drunken blackguards stagger from the billiard-room to the field, and, by the scoundrels who attend them, are permitted to carry a dispute, emanating in a question of scoring or not scoring a point or two, to an extent that the most flagitious injury would not warrant?