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When he proffered tea he had sent a negro servant all the way to Fort Prince George for the luxury, where it could be found among the hospital stores, for tea was too mild a tipple for the pioneer cow-drivers he suffered the egregious mortification of pouring out plain hot water, having forgotten to put in the tea leaves to steep.
"And having the Cow-pens against them too 'tis sad!" "Zooks!" cried the bull in disguise, with a snort. "The Cow-pens ain't against 'em when the French are coming!" "Why haven't they sent word to the soldiers?" demanded another of the cow-drivers suspiciously. "The soldiers?" she exclaimed incredulously.
Here she was vague and discursive, and prone to detail at great length the feud between the Blue Lick Stationers and the "cow-drivers" on the Keowee, evidently hoping that it might lie within the latitude of the commandant's military authority to take some order with the herder gentry, for which they would not have thanked her in the least!
But the cow-drivers heard him not! They hardly heeded the coming and the going of the pack-train and their gossips the packmen! They cared naught for the news the caravan brought of the country-side far above, nor the commissions they were wont to give for the various settlements and the metropolis far below!
John Ronackstone, who found an added liberty of disputation in the emphasis imposed by the necessity of roaring out his immutable opinions in an exceeding loud voice, retorted that so far as he was informed the "cow-drivers" on the Keowee were not certain who it was that had committed this atrocity, unless perhaps their messenger during his sojourn at Blue Lick Station had learned the name from "X." But this uncertainty, Mivane argued, was the very point of difficulty.
The antagonisms of the Blue Lick Stationers and the cow-drivers from the Keowee vanished like mist. On the one hand the stationers were assured that the stampede of the cattle was now regarded as inadvertent, and although it had occasioned an immense deal of vexatious trouble to the ranchmen, all were now well rounded up and restored to the cow-pens as of yore.
"The French!" bellowed out one of the cow-drivers in a voice that might have graced the king of the herds. "The French! Threatening Blue Lick Station!" The elderly gentleman drew back from, the painful surcharged vibrations of sound and the unseemly aspect of this interpreter, who was in good sooth like a bull in disguise.
And the Injuns all so unfriendly they might take the chance to get on the war-path again when the settlers are busy killing each other and oh, the cow-drivers will kill Ralph Emsden!"
For the cow-drivers, like the other pioneer settlers of that region and day, represented various states of society and degrees of refinement, and to those to whom she was not as a blissful reminiscence of long ago, she appeared as a revelation, new and straight from heaven, a fancy, a dream!
That the prospect of killing some Frenchman, or being themselves cruelly killed, in a national quarrel which neither faction, the cow-drivers nor the Blue Lick Stationers, half understood, should so endear men to each other was a sentiment into which she could not enter.
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