"My friends will assist you, suh. I will carry yo' crutches myself. Consider my situation. You surely, as a man of honor, will not refuse me this, Mr. Klutchem?" The colonel's eyes began to snap, and Fitz edged round to pour oil when the wind freshened. Klutchem's temper was also on the move. "Get out of this chair with that mush poultice," pointing to his foot, "and have you cart me down to Wall Street to tell me you are sorry you didn't murder me! What do you take me for?" The colonel's eyes now fairly blazed, and his voice trembled with suppressed anger. "I did take you, suh, for a gentleman. I find I am mistaken. And you refuse to go, and"-- "Yes!" roared Klutchem, his voice splitting the air like a tomahawk. "Then, suh, let me tell you right here that if you do not get up now and get into my caarriage, whenever you _can_ stand on yo' wuthless legs, I will thresh you so, suh, that you will never get up any mo'." [Illustration] CHAPTER IX _A Visit of Ceremony_ The Honorable I. B. Kerfoot, presiding judge of the district court of Fairfax County, Virginia, and the gallant Major Thomas C. Yancey, late of the Confederate army, had been the colonel's guests at his hospitable house in Bedford Place for a period of six days and six nights, when my cards--two--were given to Chad, together with my verbal hopes that both gentlemen were within. My visit was made in conformity with one of the colonel's inflexible rules,--every guest under his roof, within one week of his arrival, was to be honored by a personal call from every friend within reach. No excuse would have sufficed on the ground of flying visits. And indeed, so far as these particular birds of passage were concerned, the occupation was permanent, the judge having taken possession of the only shake-down sofa on the lower floor, and the warlike major having plumped himself into the middle of the colonel's own bed not ten minutes after his arrival. Even to the casual Northern eye, unaccustomed to the prolonged sedentary life of the average Virginian when a guest, there was every indication that these had come to stay. Chad laid both of my cards on the table, and indulged in a pantomime more graphic than spoken word. He shut his eyes, laid his cheek on one hand, and gave a groan of intense disgust, followed by certain gleeful chuckles, made the more expressive by the sly jerking of his thumb towards the dining room door and the bobbing up and down of his fore-finger in the direction of the bedroom above. "Bofe in. Yes, sah! Bofe in, an' bofe abed. Last I yeard from em' dey was hollerin' for juleps."