“And so, in light of these things, I want to make this proposition here and now: I want every man in this county whose grandfather owned eighty slaves and four thousand acres of bottom lands to vote for Mr. Montjoy. And all I ask for myself is that every man whose grandfather didn't own eighty slaves and four thousand acres, should cast his vote for me.” (A voice, “My grandpop never owned nary nigger, Toby,--I reckin you git my vote without a struggle, boy.”) Along this strain Mr. Houser continued some minutes. It was a line he had not taken in either of his previous arguments with his opponent. He branched away from it to tell what he meant to do for the people of the district in the event of his nomination and election but presently he came back again to the other theme, while Judge Priest grinned up at him from his place in the edge of the crowd and Mr. Montjoy fidgeted and fumed and wriggled as though the chair upon which he sat had been the top of a moderately hot stove. From these and from yet other signs it might have been noted that Mr. Montjoy, under the nagging semihumorous goadings of young Houser, was rapidly losing his temper, which, by our awkward Anglo-Saxon mode of speech, is but another way of saying he was not losing his temper at all but, instead, finding out that he had one. The _Cumberland Queen_ blew her whistle for departure and as the roar died away Mr. Houser might be heard in the act of finishing a sentence touching with gentle irony upon the topic which seemed so to irk and irritate Mr. Montjoy. He never finished it. Up, from his chair, sprang Mr. Montjoy, and shook a knotted fist beneath Mr. Houser's nose. “How dare you?” he demanded. “How dare you indulge in your cheap sarcasm--your low scurrilities--regarding one of the grandest men the Southland ever produced?” His voice turned falsetto and soared to a slate-pencilly screech: “I repeat it, sir--how dare you--you underbred ignoramus--you who never knew what it was to have a noble grandfather! Nobody knows who your grandfather was. I doubt whether anybody knows who your father----” Perhaps it was what Mr. Montjoy appeared to be on the point of asserting. Perhaps it was that his knuckles, as he brandished his fist in Mr. Houser's face, grazed Mr. Houser's cheek.