I was scared by the report of the gun, scared and mad, too, as I clinched with the fellow, and threw him; then I pitched him out of the door, when the rest of them threw him down and began stripping him. At the same time, some one kindled a fire under a kettle filled with tar, and in a few minutes, they were smearing him with it. This looked like going too far, to me, and I stepped back--I couldn't stand it to see the tar smeared over his face, even if it did look like a map of the devil's wild land, as he kicked and scratched and tried to bite, swearing all the time like a pirate. It seemed a degrading kind of thing to defile a human being in that way. The leader came up to me and said, "That was good work, Dutchy. Lucky I was right about its being a single-barrel, ain't it? Help get his team hitched up. We want to see him well started." "All right, Mr. McGill," I said; for that was his name, now first told in all the history of the county. "Shut up!" he said. "My name's Smith, you lunkhead!" Well, we let the claim-jumper put on his clothes over the tar and feathers, and loaded his things into his wagon, hitched up his team, and whipped them up to a run and let them go over the prairie. All the time he was swearing that he would have blood for this, but he never stopped going until he was out of sight and hearing. 2 ("What a disgraceful affair!" says my granddaughter Gertrude, as she finishes reading that page. "I'm ashamed of you, grandpa; but I'm glad he didn't shoot you. Where would I have been?" Well, it does seem like rather a shady transaction for me to have been mixed up in. The side of it that impresses me, however, is the lapse of time as measured in conditions and institutions. That was barbarism; and it was Iowa! And it was in my lifetime. It was in a region now as completely developed as England, and it goes back to things as raw and primitive as King Arthur's time. I wonder if his knights were not in the main, pretty shabby rascals, as bad as Dick McGill--or Cow Vandemark? But Gertrude has not yet heard all about that night's work.) "Now," said McGill, "for the others! Load up, and come on. This fellow will never look behind him!" But he did! The next and the last stop, was away down on Section Thirty-five--two miles farther. I was feeling rather wamble-cropped, because of the memory of that poor fellow with the tar in his eyes--but I went all the same.