miserable little skunk within twenty miles round Joliet."

Robinson was forgetting the etiquette of the West. No man--except,
perhaps, in speaking to a nigger--ever assumed a tone of insolent
superiority to any other man; if he did so, it was at the risk of
sudden death; even a hired man was habitually treated with civility.
The titles of colonel, judge, major, captain, and squire were in
constant use both in public and private; there was plenty of humorous
"chaff," but not insult. Colonels, judges, majors, captains, and
squires were civil, both to each other and to the rest of the
citizens. Robinson, in speaking to his fellow countryman, forgot for
a moment that he was not in dear old England, where he could settle a
little difference with his fists. But little Wilkins did not forget,
and he was not the kind of man to be pounded with impunity. He had in
his pocket a hunting knife, with which he could kill a hog--or a
man. When Robinson called him a skunk he felt in his pocket for the
knife, and put his thumb on the spring at the back of the buckhorn
handle, playing with it gently. It was not a British Brummagem
article, made for the foreign or colonial market, but a genuine
weapon that could be relied on at a pinch.

"Oh, I dare say you were a great man at home, weren't you?" he said.
"A lord maybe, or a landlord. But we don't have sich great men here,
and I am as good a man as you any day, skunk though I be."

Robinson had just thrown another shovelful of charcoal into the
furnace under his boiler, and he held up his shovel as if ready to
strike Williams, but it was never known whether he really intended to
strike or not.