“Shut up!” he said.  “My name’s Smith, you lunkhead!”

Well, we let the claim-jumper put on his clothes over the tar and feathers, and loaded his things into his wagon, hitched up his team, and whipped them up to a run and let them go over the prairie.  All the time he was swearing that he would have blood for this, but he never stopped going until he was out of sight and hearing.

2

("What a disgraceful affair!” says my granddaughter Gertrude, as she finishes reading that page.  “I’m ashamed of you, grandpa; but I’m glad he didn’t shoot you.  Where would I have been?” Well, it does seem like rather a shady transaction for me to have been mixed up in.  The side of it that impresses me, however, is the lapse of time as measured in conditions and institutions.  That was barbarism; and it was Iowa!  And it was in my lifetime.  It was in a region now as completely developed as England, and it goes back to things as raw and primitive as King Arthur’s time.  I wonder if his knights were not in the main, pretty shabby rascals, as bad as Dick McGill—­or Cow Vandemark?  But Gertrude has not yet heard all about that night’s work.)

“Now,” said McGill, “for the others!  Load up, and come on.  This fellow will never look behind him!”

But he did!

The next and the last stop, was away down on Section Thirty-five—­two miles farther.  I was feeling rather warnble-cropped, because of the memory of that poor fellow with the tar in his eyes—­but I went all the same.

There was a little streak of light in the east when we got to the place, but we could not at first locate the claim-jumpers.  They had gone down into a hollow, right in the very corner of the section, as if trying barely to trespass on the land, so as to be able almost to deny that they were on it at all, and were seemingly trying to hide.  We could scarcely see their outfit after we found it, for they were camped in tall grass, and their little shanty was not much larger than a dry-goods box.  Their one horse was staked out a little way off, their one-horse wagon was standing with its cover on beside a mound of earth which marked where a shallow well had been dug for water.  I heard a rustling in the wagon as we passed it, like that of a bird stirring in the branches of a tree.

McGill pounded on the door.

“Come out,” he shouted.  “You’ve got company!”

There was a scrabbling and hustling around in the shanty, and low talking, and some one asked who was there; to which McGill replied for them to come out and see.  Pretty soon, a little doddering figure of a man came to the door, pulling on his breeches with trembling hands as he stepped, barefooted, on the bare ground which came right up to the door-sill.

“What’s wanted, gentlemen?” he quavered.  “I cain’t ask you to come in—­jist yit.  What’s wanted?”