“‘I believe I spoke first, Seth Ross,’ says Sam, pretty savage at last.

“’That don’t make no difference, as I know on.  Harnah was my cousin long afore you was her father’s hired man; and that puts me in mind you hain’t asked leave yet.  Maybe the old man won’t let you go.  What you going to do then?’ asked I, dreadful kind of sneering; for I felt mad.

“Sam he didn’t say nothing; but he drew back, and doubled up his fists.  I caught the glint of his eye in the moonlight, and my darnder riz.

“‘Come on,’ says I; ’I’m ready for you; and we’ll fight it out like men.  The feller that’s licked shall give up once for all.’

“But ’fore Sam could speak, or I could hit out as I wanted ter, Harnah come right in between us.  I swow ef that gal didn’t look harnsome!  Her eyes was wide open, and shining just like blue steel in the moonlight.  Her cheeks and lips was white; and seemed to me the very curls of her hair shot out sparks, she was so mad.

“‘You’d better stop while there’s time,’ says she, still and cold.  ’If you strike one another, or if you ever fight, and I the cause, I swear to God I never will speak a civil word to either one of you again as long as I live.  So now you know.

“’As for the harebells, you sha’n’t neither one of you go for ’em.  Ef I want harebells, there’s them that can get ’em for me, and not make so much fuss about it neither.’

“She turned, and stepped off toward the house as if she’d got steel springs in the soles of her feet.

“Sam and I eyed each other.  It seemed as if Harnah felt that look; for she turned all of a sudden, and come back.

“‘Sam,’ says she, p’inting up to the house, ’go home; and don’t you speak to me again to-night.  Seth, get into your boat, and push her off.  You needn’t come up to-morrow night.’

“We sort o’ looked at one another and at her, and then meeched off the way she told us, for all the world like two dogs that’s got a licking, and been sent home ’fore the hunt was done.

“I didn’t sleep a great deal that night.  Fact is, I was turning over in my own mind what Harnah had said about them as would git harebells for her, and not make so much fuss about it neither.

“‘I swow,’ says I, ’I’d like to clinch that feller, whoever he may be, and not have Harnah nigh enough to interfere.’  Then I rec’lected a Cap’n Harris, a British officer, that come down from Canady the summer before, hunting and fishing, and had stopped a week or more at Uncle ’Siah’s, mostly for the sake of seeing Harnah, as I thought then, and do now.  Ever since, when Harnah didn’t know how else to plague Sam and me, she’d set up to talk about ‘real gentlemen,’ and ‘folks that knowed manners,’ and all sech stuff.  Then she’d pretend she’d got a letter from Cap’n Harris, and that he was coming agin, and all that.  So now I got it in my head that Cap’n Harris was coming, and that she meant he’d get the harebells.