A Man of Two Countries

What was it? A crash of thunder? A living bolt of fire? Something threw the intervening men violently to the deck. The stripling who had accepted the traditional shilling brushed the crowd aside and knocked down the slanderer of all women--and of his queen!

"Take that back!" Philip breathed, not shouted, as one less angry might have done. "You will not? You shall!"

Burroughs sprang to his feet instantly and returned the blow valiantly. He did not draw his Colt's as frontiersmen were prone to do, for he thought that a knock-down fight would show that a man must not stand too much on dignity on the upper Missouri. Besides, the lad was English, therefore to be punished.

At once the trifling affair widened