Page:War; or, What happens when one loves one's enemy, John Luther Long, 1913.djvu/78

WAR advice and tend to your own business and keep behind your own fences and join things and enlist yourself—like they say you're doing. If you don't maybe there's a licking due you."

"Hah!" laughs Ben, "I wouldn't give much for the skin of any man who raises his hand against me! I can bring a thousand men up the valley in ten minutes."

"Well," says I, madder and madder, "I'll risk my skin and do it now—one against a thousand and one!"

And I would—if a squad of Unions hadn't rode up just then.

"Are these the aforesaid thousand?" I asked Ben. "All right if they're that color."

"No," says he. "They re not that color, dam' you!"

Of course everybody knew that Ben was a kind of secessionist—but I didn't know he was as outspoken and fighty as that. He use' to sit in "Africa" at the church—right out front.

The commanding officer studies us both for a minute, and looks up and down the valley, 62