Wilkins halted his team and went into the whisky-mill, where the owner, Robinson, was throwing charcoal into the furnace under his boiler with a long-handled shovel.  He was an enterprising Englishman who was wooing the smiles of fortune with better prospects of success than the slow, hard-working farmer.  I had seen him first in West Joliet in ’49, when he was travelling around buying corn for his distillery.  He was a handsome man, about thirty years of age, five feet ten inches in height, had been well educated, was quite able to hold his own among the men of the West, and accommodated himself to their manners and habits.

There were three other farmers present, and their talk drifted from one thing to another until it at last settled on the question of the relative advantages of life in England and the States.  Robinson took the part of England, Wilkins stuck to the States; he said: 

“A poor man has no chance at home; he is kept down by landlords, and can never get a farm of his own.  In Illinois I am a free man, and have no one to lord it over me.  If I had lived and slaved in England for a hundred years I should never have been any better off, and now I have a farm as good as any in Will County, and am just as good a man as e’er another in it.”

Now Wilkins was only a small man, shorter by four inches than Robinson, who towered above him, and at once resented the claim to equality.  He said: 

“You as good as any other man, are you?  Why there ain’t a more miserable little skunk within twenty miles round Joliet.”

Robinson was forgetting the etiquette of the West.  No man—­except, perhaps, in speaking to a nigger—­ever assumed a tone of insolent superiority to any other man; if he did so, it was at the risk of sudden death; even a hired man was habitually treated with civility.  The titles of colonel, judge, major, captain, and squire were in constant use both in public and private; there was plenty of humorous “chaff,” but not insult.  Colonels, judges, majors, captains, and squires were civil, both to each other and to the rest of the citizens.  Robinson, in speaking to his fellow countryman, forgot for a moment that he was not in dear old England, where he could settle a little difference with his fists.  But little Wilkins did not forget, and he was not the kind of man to be pounded with impunity.  He had in his pocket a hunting knife, with which he could kill a hog—­or a man.  When Robinson called him a skunk he felt in his pocket for the knife, and put his thumb on the spring at the back of the buckhorn handle, playing with it gently.  It was not a British Brummagem article, made for the foreign or colonial market, but a genuine weapon that could be relied on at a pinch.

“Oh, I dare say you were a great man at home, weren’t you?” he said.  “A lord maybe, or a landlord.  But we don’t have sich great men here, and I am as good a man as you any day, skunk though I be.”