27. The provoker to a beer-challenge must be challenged within five minutes. If he will double on the challenge, he must do it immediately, and according to the fixed gradations of §24.
The settling of the challenge must be completed within five minutes after the challenge is given; and the drink-duel must be immediately contested, if the challenged has not yet an older scandal[[51]] to defend.
28. Every earlier scandal must take precedence of a later. If any one asserts that he has yet an earlier scandal, he must name the person with whom it depends. The antagonist has a right to name an umpire, who must take care that the scandal is effaced in its regular order, or otherwise the umpire must write the name of the first on the beer-table with the penalty belonging to the offence.
29. The proceeding in fighting out a scandal is as follows:--Each pawkant or combatant appoints a second, of whom the seconder of the challenger, on his cerevis, makes the weapons equal. If the weapons, however, appear unequal to the other second, he can call an umpire, who decides whether they are equal or not. If the umpire declares that the weapons are not equal, he who calls the umpire, has, after the scandal is fought out, to propose the proper penalty for the second who failed to make the weapons equal, according to § 131, No. 11 (a).
30. At the place of the challenged the weapons are made equal, and the beer-scandal is there fought out.
31. If the weapons are equal, the second of the challenged gives the following commando, "Seize it! put to! loose!"
32. Before this commando, the drinking must not begin; and should it begin, either of the seconds must cry halt, and the weapons must be again made equal. But halt cannot be cried after the word "loose" is given.
33. Both parties must drink instantly on the command being given, whereupon the commanding second, after both have drunk, first declares his judgment, and then the other second either admits this judgment or not. If the latter be the case, so the seconds themselves must drink off a Learned Man, be the quantity what it may for which they stood seconds, except in the cases stated in §§ 34 and 35.
34. Drinks not one of the two combatants on the given commando, the prescribed quantity, or bleeds he, or pauses during the drinking, or leaves a Philistine in the glass; so is he a defaulter, and must, within five minutes, drink once more the prescribed quantity. If he do this not, he is put under the beer-bann, and the quantity which he has failed to drink is written on the beer-tablet against him.
35. He is equally a defaulter if he breaks his glass in setting it down, or overturns it, except, in the last case, he can set it up again before his antagonist is ready.