retreating, "I fall back upon my
previous theory of your general facetiousness. I have the fortune to be
in company with a humorist--a wag."

"Fall back you had better, and wag it is," cried the Missourian,
following him up, and wagging his raccoon tail almost into the
herb-doctor's face, "look you!"

"At what?"

"At this coon. Can you, the fox, catch him?"

"If you mean," returned the other, not unselfpossessed, "whether I
flatter myself that I can in any way dupe you, or impose upon you, or
pass myself off upon you for what I am not, I, as an honest man, answer
that I have neither the inclination nor the power to do aught of the
kind."

"Honest man? Seems to me you talk more like a craven."

"You in vain seek to pick a quarrel with me, or put any affront upon me.
The innocence in me heals me."

"A healing like your own nostrums. But you are a queer man--a very queer
and dubious man; upon the whole, about the most so I ever met."

The scrutiny accompanying this seemed unwelcome to the diffidence of the
herb-doctor. As if at once to attest the absence of resentment, as well
as to change the subject, he threw a kind of familiar cordiality into
his air, and said: "So you are going to get some machine made to do your
work? Philanthropic scruples, doubtless, forbid your going as far as New
Orleans for slaves?"

"Slaves?" morose again in a twinkling, "won't have 'em! Bad enough to
see whites ducking and grinning round for a favor, without having those
poor devils of niggers congeeing round for their corn. Though, to me,
the niggers are the freer of the two. You are an abolitionist, ain't
you?" he added, squaring himself with both hands on his rifle, used for
a staff, and gazing in the herb-doctor's face with no more reverence
than if it were a target. "You are an abolitionist, ain't you?"

"As to that, I cannot so readily answer. If by abolitionist you mean a
zealot, I am none; but if you mean a man, who, being a man, feels for
all men, slaves included, and by any lawful act, opposed to nobody's
interest, and therefore, rousing nobody's enmity, would willingly
abolish suffering (supposing it, in its degree, to exist) from among
mankind, irrespective of color, then am I what you say."

"Picked and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable
understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for
wrong, but are useless for right."

"From all this," said the herb-doctor, still fo