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I was a hobo then and you told me to go to hell, but now when you see I've got eight hundred dollars you're trying to bunco me out of it. I know who you are, I've heard the boys tell about you you're one of these blue-bellied Yankees that try to make a living swapping jack-knives. You got your name from that Bunker Hill monument and they shortened it down to Bunk.
The boys say that one can throw a piece up against a tree, and it will just stick there and quiver and twitch for all the world like one of those blue-bellied lizards at home will do when you knock him off a fence rail with a stick.
Dash, dash the whole dashed blue-bellied outfit, and be dash, dash, dashed to their quadruple dashed souls!" and the concentrated spite and hatred of the speaker hissed in every syllable. "'Taint a question of what we couldn't do. What can we do? He's got money and plenty of it cached somewhere about the old camp, and five hundred dollars of it's mine. That's what I want.
I didn't s'pose thar wuz so nice a man, or sich a good-lookin' one, in the hull Yankee army, or in the oonfederit either, fur that matter. But, then, yo' ain't no real blue-bellied Yankee." "No, indeed, Sophrony. I never saw New England in all my life, nor did any o' my people. "Say, Mister, why don't you leave the Yankee army?" "Can't," said Shorty, despairingly.
"See here, Le Gaire, you leave my daughter's name out of this." The enraged captain favored him with a glance. "I know more about this affair than you do, Hardy. This blue-bellied puppy was with Billie before, and I knew there was some infernal scheme on the moment I saw him here to-night. The girl helped him to get away once before, and there's some trick being worked off now."
"But my mother," he added, "was a good blue-bellied Yankee." We lured him on to using that delightfully quaint expression again before we left him; and we also learned from him valuable information as to the possibilities of lunch farther along the road, for we were in a lonely district with no inns, and it was Sunday.
Another voice immediately spoke up in command: "Steady, men! Keep cool! Fire low, and give it to the blue-bellied scoundrels!" Then broke out a mad rage of death and destruction, in which both sides seemed in the fiercest insanity of murder.
"Well, I'm Squire Rawson of Ridgely, and I know more law than a hundred consarned blue-bellied thief-hiders like you. Whoever says I am drunk is a liar. But if I was drunk is that any reason for you to let a thief rob me? What is your name? I've a mind to arrest you and run you in myself. I've run many a better man in."
Winding up a three-minute speech with the remark, "I could pick ye up and ate ye, only the taste would turn me stomach, you white-livered, blue-bellied son of a scut," the lady had to pause for breath, and the soldier looked up from under his hat-brim and mildly remarked, "Madam, you're prejudiced," whereat even some of her sympathizers forgot their rancor and roared with laughter, and the idolatrous rank of his soldiery doubled up like so many blue pocket-rules, and the newspaper men chuckled with glee.
But they don't lose their robustness. In the solid cities the solidest you ever saw, all being of granite such as Edinburgh and Aberdeen, where you see the prosperous class, they look the sturdiest and most independent fellows you ever saw. As they grow old they all look like blue-bellied Presbyterian elders.
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