"I'm a rooting, tooting, shooting, fighting son-of-a-gun--_and a good
one!_" Ford would declaim, and with deadly intent aim a lump of coal,
billiard ball, or glass at some unfortunate individual in his audience.
"Hit the nigger and get a cigar! You're just hanging around out there
till I drink myself to sleep--but I'm fooling you a few! I'm watching
the clock with one eye, and I take my dose regular and not too frequent.
I'm going to kill off a few of these smart boys that have been talking
about me and my wife. She's a lady, my wife is, and I'll kill the first
man that says she isn't." (One cannot, you will understand, be too
explicit in a case like this; not one thousandth part as explicit as
Ford was.)

"I'm going to begin on Sam, pretty quick," he called through the open
door. "I've got him right where I want him." And he stated, with
terrible exactness, his immediate intentions towards the bartender.

Behind his barricade of barrels, Sam heard and shivered like a gun-shy
collie at a turkey shoot; shivered until human nerves could bear no
more, and like the collie he left the storeroom and fled with a yelp of
sheer terror. Ford turned just as Sam shot through the doorway into the
dining-room, and splintered a beer bottle against the casing; glanced
solemnly up at the barroom clock and, retreating to the nearly denuded
bar, gravely poured himself another drink; held up the glass to the
dusk-filmed window, squinted through it, decided that he needed a little
more than that, and added another teaspoonful. Then he poured the
contents of the glass down his throat as if it were so much water, wiped
his lips upon a bar towel, picked a handful of coal from the depleted
coal-hod, went to the door, and shouted to those outside to produce
Sam, that he might be killed in an extremely unpleasant manner.