By this time the young darky was fairly groveling in the dust.
“Do yo’ comprehen’ dat,” yelled the old man, “yo’ po’ benighted parallelergram, distended from de apex of a truncated coon (cone), yo’ bow-legged son of a parallelopipedon—”
But the old man got no further with his geometrical swearing, for amid the shouts of the spectators his opponent had vanished, and as he went up the street to have the old man arrested for swearing in public, he remarked to the policeman as he told his tale: “I didn’t keer, Cap’n, ’bout ’im outgineralin’ me er flingin’ English, an’ outcussin’ me in mo’ kinder newfangled cuss words den eber cum out ob Turkey, but when he ’flected on my mother by callin’ me de bow-legged-son-ob-a-parrot-an-er-pigeon-roost, de nigger don’t lib dat I gwi’ take dat frum!”
It was a week later before Old Wash and I had occasion to drive into the stable again. We were met by the same darky, who took the mare by the bit and meekly remarked: “Light, gentlemen; I’ll take de mair.”
And the old man said: “I am so excruciatinly rejoiced, sonny, to recognize de rejuvernated resurrection ob de exhileratin’ perception dat an infinertesermal ray ob common sense has penertrated de comatose condition ob yo’ fibrous misunderstanding’. In other words,” he winked, “I’se saved an ebononic interlec frum er new-bohn grave.”
“The Little Girl.”
Pioneer days in Texas, and the prairies unbroken by the smoke of a single cabin. To the south the Brazos, and to the west the buffalo lands, the herds crawling in the distance, like huge mud-waves on land, toward their fall feeding grounds.
There had been raids by the Comanches, then hot fighting with the troops and every settler west of the Brazos had run into the fort, each with his family, his man-servant and maid-servant, each with his cattle and his asses. For the Comanches are wily devils and born horsemen. One day they are here, and the next they are not. And they go on ponies that are as tough as their riders, and as fast and as fearless, and no man knows when and where they will strike.
Three full companies of troops had gone north on the track of the desperate band who, but a few days before, had surprised the settlers on the upper Brazos and, after killing and scalping and plundering, had fled, as the troops thought, northward. The stricken settlers had been coming in for two days, all plundered, tired, many wounded and some still sobbing with the grief that would never die.
There were little children—motherless, fatherless. There were mothers and fathers who but a day before held loving ones in their arms.