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,
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