Page:Sketches by Mark Twain.djvu/128

126 to speak of those cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such gruel as that. Give me the pen!&quot;

I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plough through another man's verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While he was in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window, and marred the symmetry of my ear.

&quot;Ah,&quot; said he, &quot;that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano—he was due yesterday.&quot; And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and fired. Smith dropped shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith's aim, who was just taking a second chance, and he crippled a stranger. It was me. Merely a finger shot off.

Then the chief editor went on with his erasures and interlineations. Just as he finished them a hand-grenade came down the stove-pipe, and the explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments. However it did no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my teeth out.

&quot;That stove is utterly ruined,&quot; said the chief editor.

I said I believed it was.

&quot;Well, no matter—don't wan't it this kind of weather. I know the man that did it. I'll get him. Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be written.&quot;

I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations till its mother wouldn't have known it if it had had one, It now read as follows:—