known it--yuh look enough like him. Me drink with a son of John Carleton?
That breed uh wolves had better not come howling around _my_ door. I asked
yuh to come t' King's Highway, young man, and I don't take it back. You
can come, but you'll get the same sort uh welcome I'd give that--"

Right there I got my hand on his throttle. He was an old man,
comparatively, and I didn't want to hurt him; but no man under heaven can
call my dad the names he did, and I told him so. "I don't want to dig up
that old quarrel, King," I said, shaking him a bit with one hand, just to
emphasize my words, "but you've got to speak civilly of dad, or, by the
Lord! I'll turn you across my knee and administer a stinging rebuke."

He tried to squirm loose, and to reach behind him with that suggestive
movement that breeds trouble among men of the plains; but I held his arms
so he couldn't move, the while I told him a lot of things about true
politeness--things that I wasn't living up to worth mentioning. He yelled
to the postmaster to grab me, and the fellow tried it. I backed into a
corner and held old King in front of me as a bulwark, warranted bullet
proof, and wondered what kind of a hornet's-nest I'd got into. The waiter
and the postmaster were both looking for an opening, and I remembered that
I was on old King's territory, and that they were after holding their
jobs.

I don't know how it would have ended--I suppose they'd have got me,
eventually--but Perry Potter walked in, and it didn't seem to take him all
day to savvy the situation. He whipped out a gun and leveled it at the
enemy, and told me to scoot and get on my horse.

"Scoot nothing!" I yelled back. "What about you in the meantime? Do you
think I'm going to leave them to clean you up?"