"No! no! I never did; and I don't know that I ever will. I think I should feel a leetle particlar, at standin up and shooting at a real Christian man, with flesh and blood like you and me. You see, when we boys of the long guns shoot, we don't turn our heads away and pull trigger in a world of smoke, so that nobody can tell where the lead goes; we look right into the white of a fellow's eye, and can most always tell which side of his nose the ball went, and you see that would be but a slayin and skinnen business among white people; but as to shootin and sculpin Injins, that's a thing there is no bones made about, because out on the frontiers at the west, if a man should stand addlin his brains about the right and the wrong of the thing, the red devils would just knock them out to settle the matter, and sculp him for his pains into the bargain. Shooting real Christian men's quite another thing. It's what I ha'nt tried yet; but when we Kentuck boys gits at it, it won't all end like a log-rollin, with one or two broken shins and a black eye. But I'm told the Yankees always sings a psalm before they go to battle. Now, according to my notion, a chap would make a blue fist of takin a dead aim through double sights, with the butt end of a psalm in his guzzle." "Some person must have told you that as a joke," said Lamar. "No, no, I believe it, because we had just such a fellow once in our neighbourhood--a Yankee schoolmaster--and we took him out a deer-driving two or three times, and he was always singing a psalm at his stand. He spoilt the fun, confound him! Hang me if I didn't always think the fellow was afraid to stand in the woods by himself without it. I went to his singin school of Saturday nights, too; but I never had a turn that way. All the master could do, he could'nt keep me on the trail,--I was for ever slipping into Yankee Doodle; you see, every once in a while, the tune would take a quick turn, like one I knowed afore, so I used to blaze away at it with the best of 'em, but the same old Yankee Doodle always turned up at the end. But the worst of it was, the infernal Yankee spoiled all the music I ever had in me; when I come out of the school, I thought the gals at home would have killed themselves laughin' at me. They said I ground up Yankee Doodle and Old Hundred together, all in a hodge-podge, so I never sings to no one now but the dumb brutes in the stable, when they gits melancholy of a rainy day. Old Pete here raises his ears, and begins to snort the minute I raises a tune." "Your singing-master was, like his scholar, an original."