A DIGNIFIED FLARE-UP.                           83
" Look here, Kentuck, I don't allow people to talk to me in that sort of a way, sir !"
The lieutenant here interposed, in a good-humored manner, and soon restored a negative sort of peace, though the Texan was surly about it for some time.
This was a very foolish display of sensitiveness on my part, which a little further knowledge of the spirit of frontier life would have saved me from. He did not mean anything more than a coarse joke; and my dignified flare-up was all " pearls before swine " among such men, which I felt afterwards was a little verdant, and out of keeping with the tone I should have preserved under circumstances I had voluntarily thrown myself into. The truth is, I was fagged and but of spirits, from the loss of the whole night's rest, after the fatigues and suffering of the day before, and had little of the reckless buoyancy left, which was necessary to carry me without difficulty through such scenes. I dwell upon this little incident, because it was characteristic, and the reader will see that I afterwards had some trouble about it. When we were quieted again, and got to work upon our breakfast, I took a good look at the new comers.
The lieutenant, as they called him, impressed me as a greasy, easy, good-for-nothing sort of a somebody ; while Davis, who was a thin, athletic person, with a pale, olive complexion, wore upon his sharp face that keen, restless, knavish look, to be in the presence of which, makes one feel fidgety. There was a quick, incessant play of light about his eyes that reminded me of a snake's tongue vibrating in strong sunshine.
The fellow was dressed in the extreme of a mongrel dandyism, which seemed to be the result of an untiring effort to unite all the exaggerations of all the costumes he had ever seen, and was more of a hotch-potch than even the equipage of his horse. His coarse, black hair, plastered with lard into genuine " s^ap locks," a half-yard in length, was sticking about his shoulders, over which was thrown, with a most jaunty air, a full-circle cloak of coarse blue cloth, lined down the fronts with flaming scarlet velvet, which was so disposed as to show its every inch ; his neckcloth was a coarse silk of the same gaudy color, and disposed in folds, the amplitude of which would have  laid the Broadway dandies
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