The History of Louisville, from the Earliest Settlement till the Year 1852Casseday, Ben
History
The History of Louisville, from the Earliest Settlement till the Year 1852
Casseday, Ben
Louisville (Ky.) -- Description and travel; Louisville (Ky.) -- History
They used rifles, the ground was measured, the affair settled in the most
proper and approved style. And they did put it to each other. Each
received a ball in some fleshy part, and each admitted that "he was
satisfied."
"You are all grit!" said Col. Plug.
"And you waded in like a raal Kaintuck," rejoined Nine-Eyes.
Col. Plug's son and heir, who very possibly was the real subject-matter of
dispute, and who was upon the ground, was ordered to place a bottle of
whisky midway between the disputants. Up to this they limped and over it
they embraced, swearing that "they were too well used to these things to
be phazed by a little cold lead;" and Pluggy's virtue having been thus
proved immaculate, the duel as well as the animosity of the parties
ceased. Col. Plug, man of honor as he was, sometimes met with very rough
treatment from the boatmen, whose half savage natures could ill appreciate
a gentleman of his birth and breeding. An instance of this is recorded by
the same historian upon whom we have drawn for the greater part of the
above account of the duel.[4] A broad-horn from Louisville had received
rough usage from Plug's men the year before, and accordingly, on their
next descent, they laid their scheme of revenge. Several of their crew
left the boat before arriving at Plug's domain, and quietly stole down the
river bank to its place of landing. The boat with its small crew was
quietly harbored, the men hospitably received and invited to sit down to a
game of cards. They were scarcely seated and had placed their money before
them, when Plug's signal whistle for an onset sounded in their ears. The
reserve corps of boatmen also heard it, knew its import and rushed to the
rescue. The battle was quickly over. Three of Plug's men were thrown into
the river and the rest fled, leaving their brave commander on the field.
Resistance did not avail him. Those ruthless boatmen stripped him to the
skin, and forcing him to embrace a sapling about the size of his dear
Pluggy's waist, they bound him immovably in this loving squeeze. Then
seizing the cowhide each applied it till he was tired, and so they left
him alone with his troublesome thoughts and with a yet more troublesome
and sanguinary host of musquitoes, which, lured by the ease with which
they could now get a full meal of that blood which had before been
effectually preserved from their attacks by a thick epidermis, sallied
forth to the feast by myriads. Pluggy, finding her bower lonely without
its lord, came forth to seek him. Closely embracing the tree and covered
from any immodest exposure of his person by a gauzy cloud of musquito
wings, she found him. Clasping her hands, with a Siddons-like start and
air, she cried, in her peculiarly elegant but somewhat un-English dialect:
"Yasu Cree! O carissimo sposo, what for, like von dem fool, you hug zat
tree and let ze marengoes eat up all your sweet brud?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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