"You think a relation might; or would feel in that sort of way ?" "Why, blank it all, sir," said the Colonel, "nothing is more common.
Why, in '52 one of my oldest friends, Doctor Byrne, of St.Jo, the seventh in a line from old General Byrne, of St.Louis, was killed, sir, by Pinkey Riggs, seventh in a line from Senator Riggs, of Kentucky.
Original cause, sir, something about a d----d roasting ear, or a blank persimmon in 1832; forty-seven men wiped out in twenty years.

Fact, sir." "It ain't that," said the stranger, moving hesitatingly in his chair.
"If it was anything of that sort I wouldn't mind,--it might bring matters to a wind-up, and I shouldn't have to come here and have this cursed talk with you." It was so evident that this frank and unaffected expression of some obscure disgust with his own present position had no other implication, that the Colonel did not except to it.

Yet the man did not go on.

He stopped and seemed lost in sombre contemplation of his hat.
The Colonel leaned back in his chair, fanned himself elegantly, wiped his forehead with a large pongee handkerchief, and looking at his companion, whose shadowed abstraction seemed to render him impervious to the heat, said:-- "My dear Mr.Corbin, I perfectly understand you.

Blank it all, sir, the temperature in this infernal hole is quite enough to render any confidential conversation between gentlemen upon delicate matters utterly impossible.