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Each gave his principal a pistol, and stationed him so that they stood some twenty paces apart. "Gentlemen, with your weapons pointed groundward, on the word, you will walk toward each other, and fire when it pleases you," ordered Major Edwards. "Are you ready? Go!" The duellists, with their pistol hands dropped, walked steadily forward, one, two, three, four, five strides.
She rightly conjectured that, after the affair of the store-cupboard in the garden-room, there could be nothing of lesser importance than "the duel" which could take that lady through those abhorred portals. Miss Mapp had gone straight home from her visit to the Poppits just about eleven, and stationed herself in the window where she could keep an eye on the houses of the duellists.
Yet these hard lessons proved useful, for they taught me to mistrust the impudent sycophants who openly flatter their dupes, and never to rely upon the offers made by fawning flatterers. They taught me likewise how to behave in the company of quarrelsome duellists, the society of whom ought to be avoided, unless we make up our mind to be constantly in the very teeth of danger.
What a roystering set those Cavaliers were! Fond of horse racing, cock fighting, gambling and drinking, the soul of hospitality, quick to take offense, and quicker to forgive, duellists as brave as Spartans, chivalric, proud of honor, their province, their blood and their families, they envied only one being in the world and that was he who could establish his claim to the possession of a strain from the veins of the dusky daughter of Powhatan Pocahontas.
This called for men whom both the German and the British duellists would trust to succour the human beings crouched and helpless under the circling flashes of their steel. Fortunately, our Minister to Belgium was Brand Whitlock. He is no Talleyrand or Metternich. If he were, the Belgians might not have been fed, because he might have been suspected of being too much of a diplomatist.
Güntz nodded cheerfully to Reimers as he took his weapon. The umpire then took up his position and convinced himself with a glance that all was prepared. The duellists were standing at their marked lines, the seconds at a little distance alongside of them. He took out his watch, and glancing at it said: "I shall count: ready, one, then three seconds; two, and again three seconds; then, stop!
The air was so thick that it was not easy to see where were the sullen group of diggers presided over by the quondam duellists of Thirsk, Kitson and Trenton, now the most inseparable and impracticable of men; but James and his companions had ridden about two miles from the market-place, when Ralf Percy came out of the mist, exclaiming, 'Is it you, Sir King?
Nevertheless, such was the state of public opinion about questions of "honor" that Decatur felt constrained to accept the challenge. The two naval officers met on the duelling ground at Bladensburg, "the cockpit of Washington duellists," on the 22nd of March, 1820. Barron was near-sighted, and insisted upon a closer distance than the usual ten paces. They were placed a scant eight paces apart.
"Go and settle it at the stones" was the standing order; and so all who were inclined to be demonstrative in any affair of honesty or honour went to the stones and fought it out. If either of the duellists was knocked down, that was the final settlement. No one else interfered, and so, by common consent in such matters, these two villages were noted for peace and order.
Any of those hollows, he knew, might prove to contain the duellists in the very act of firing, and over the rim of each he had to pop his unprotected head. One murder the more made little difference to desperate men. Other shocks, less deadly but extremely unnerving, might await him.
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