Well, say! old King turned the color of a ripe prune; every hair in that stubble of beard stood straight out from his chin, and he looked as if murder would be a pleasant thing.  He took the glass and deliberately emptied the whisky on the floor.  “John Carleton’s son, eh?  I might ‘a’ known it—­yuh look enough like him.  Me drink with a son of John Carleton?  That breed uh wolves had better not come howling around my door.  I asked yuh to come t’ King’s Highway, young man, and I don’t take it back.  You can come, but you’ll get the same sort uh welcome I’d give that—­”

Right there I got my hand on his throttle.  He was an old man, comparatively, and I didn’t want to hurt him; but no man under heaven can call my dad the names he did, and I told him so.  “I don’t want to dig up that old quarrel, King,” I said, shaking him a bit with one hand, just to emphasize my words, “but you’ve got to speak civilly of dad, or, by the Lord!  I’ll turn you across my knee and administer a stinging rebuke.”

He tried to squirm loose, and to reach behind him with that suggestive movement that breeds trouble among men of the plains; but I held his arms so he couldn’t move, the while I told him a lot of things about true politeness—­things that I wasn’t living up to worth mentioning.  He yelled to the postmaster to grab me, and the fellow tried it.  I backed into a corner and held old King in front of me as a bulwark, warranted bullet proof, and wondered what kind of a hornet’s-nest I’d got into.  The waiter and the postmaster were both looking for an opening, and I remembered that I was on old King’s territory, and that they were after holding their jobs.

I don’t know how it would have ended—­I suppose they’d have got me, eventually—­but Perry Potter walked in, and it didn’t seem to take him all day to savvy the situation.  He whipped out a gun and leveled it at the enemy, and told me to scoot and get on my horse.

“Scoot nothing!” I yelled back.  “What about you in the meantime?  Do you think I’m going to leave them to clean you up?”

He smiled sourly at me.  “I’ve held my own with this bunch uh trouble-hunters for thirty years,” he said dryly.  “I guess yuh ain’t got any reason t’ be alarmed.  Come out uh that corner and let ’em alone.”

I don’t, to this day, know why I did it, but I quit hugging old King, and the other two fell back and gave me a clear path to the door.  “King was blackguarding dad, and I couldn’t stand for it,” I explained to Perry Potter as I went by.  “If you’re not going, I won’t.”

“I’ve got a letter to mail,” he said, calm as if he were in his own corral.  “You went off before I got a chance to give it to yuh.  I’ll be out in a minute.”