While this disgusting banter was going on I observed a planter ride up to one of the brokers and whisper for some time in his ear. The planter was a bad but unmistakable likeness of my friend Moore, worked over, so to speak, with a loaded brush and heavily glazed with old Bourbon whisky. After giving his orders to the agent he retired to the outskirts of the crowd, and began flicking his long dusty boots with a serviceable cowhide whip. "Well, gentlemen, we must really adopt the friendly suggestion of Judge Lee and chuck this nigger into the next lot." So the auctioneer was saying, when the broker to whom I have referred cried out, "Ten dollars." "_This_ is more like business," cried the auctioneer. "Ten dollars offered! What amateur says more than ten dollars for this lot? His extreme age and historical reminiscences alone, if he could communicate them, would make him invaluable to the student." To my intense amazement Moore shouted from horseback, "Twenty dollars." "What, _you_ want a cheap nigger to get your hand in, do you, you blank- blanked abolitionist?" cried a man who stood near. He was a big, dirty- looking bully, at least half drunk, and attending (not unnecessarily) to his toilet with the point of a long, heavy knife. Before the words were out of his mouth Moore had leaped from his horse and delivered such a right-handed blow as that wherewith the wandering beggar-man smote Irus of old in the courtyard of Odysseus, Laertes' son. "On his neck, beneath the ear, he smote him, and crushed in the bones; and the red blood gushed up through his mouth, and he gnashed his teeth together as he kicked the ground." Moore stooped, picked up the bowie- knife, and sent it glittering high through the air. "Take him away," he said, and two rough fellows, laughing, carried the bully to the edge of the fountain that played in the corner of the square. He was still lying crumpled up there when we rode out of Clayville. The bidding, of course, had stopped, owing to the unaffected interest which the public took in this more dramatic interlude. The broker, it is true, had bid twenty-five dollars, and was wrangling with the auctioneer. "You have my bid, Mr. Brinton, sir, and there is no other offer. Knock down the lot to me." "You wait your time, Mr. Isaacs," said the auctioneer. "No man can do two things at once and do them well. When Squire Moore has settled with Dick Bligh he will desert the paths of military adventure for the calmer and more lucrative track of commercial enterprise." The auctioneer's command of long words was considerable, and was obviously of use to him in his daily avocations. When he had rounded his period, Moore was in the saddle again, and nodded silently to the auctioneer. "Squire Moore bids thirty dollars. Thirty dollars for this once despised but now appreciated fellow-creature," rattled on the auctioneer. The agent nodded again. "Forty dollars bid," said the auctioneer. "Fifty," cried Moore.