"Who's there?" he said, with a quiver in his voice.
"Open up, and find out!" said a man in the Monterey Centre crowd, who
seemed to take command as a matter of course. "Kick the door
open, Dutchy!"
As he said this he stepped aside, and pushed me up to the door. I gave
it a push with my knee, and the leader jerked me aside, just in time to
let a charge of shot pass my head.
"It's only a single-barrel gun," said he. "Grab him!"
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.
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