Harshaw, leaning forward, both arms on his desk, attentively listening, pursed up his red lips meditatively and nodded with abstracted affirmation, as if pondering the position. He gave no outward expression of gratulation, but he was quick to mark the accession of recruits to his ranks. He could command a stalwart and callous fortitude. He could receive without wincing, without anger, without shame, Kinsard’s jeers and thrusts, for the sake of the aroused antagonism which seemed the natural sequence of the young man’s insistent arguments. “It specially becomes the House,” continued the member, “to countenance no leniency in regard to dueling and all that pertains to it, after the will of the people has been so unequivocally expressed in regard to the matter of the challenge, or what was so construed, upon this floor.” The member was rebuked here for infringement of parliamentary usage in upbraiding, as it were, the previous actions of the House and interrupting the member who had the floor. Kinsard, restive under the interpolation, seized the opportunity to resume. “There is no pretense of justification for adopting formal resolutions to asperse the oath of an honorable man, least of all at the instigation of his avowed personal enemy. The story we have heard is at its worst merely a country boy’s ‘taking up a dare.’ I will venture to say that there is not a man within the sound of my voice who has not had similar affrays,—has not in the days of his youth ‘taken up a dare,’ has not fought by appointment.” “Will the member explain what he means by a duel?” demanded Harshaw. He did not turn his big yellow head; he only cast his opaque blue eyes at Kinsard, and once more looked down at his hands clasped on his desk. For a moment Kinsard, taken unaware, was checked. “Perhaps the member had best begin at the beginning, and define a challenge,” suggested a satiric voice from the rear. There was a sharp call to order from the chair, and Kinsard, rallying himself, went tumultuously on. “I am not a dictionary,” he proclaimed angrily. “I am not here to enlighten your ignorance.” Harshaw, elated by the allusion to the old question of the challenge, intimating anew a flocking to his standard, interrupted cleverly: “I have a dictionary right here,—a law dictionary.” He read aloud, “Dueling is the fighting of two persons, one against another, at an appointed time and place, on a precedent quarrel.” Kinsard vociferously claimed the floor, although it had become very evident to the House that the interest he advocated fared hardly less severely at the hands of its friend than its foe. In debate he was no match for the wily Harshaw,—his natural endowments, his enthusiasms, his finer emotions, succumbing to a practiced logic, and a militant habit, and an instinctive discernment of the vulnerable point.