Adapted From The Autobiography of Davy Crockett

One day as I was walking through the woods, I came to a clearing on a hillside, and as I climbed the slope I was startled by loud, profane and boisterous voices which seemed to proceed from a thick cover of undergrowth about two hundred yards in advance of me.

“You kin, kin you?”

“Yes I kin and I’m able to do it! Boo-oo-oo!—O wake snakes, brimstone and fire! Don’t hold me, Nick Stoval; the fight’s made up and I’ll jump down your throat before you kin say ‘quit.’”

“Now Nick, don’t hold him! Just let the wildcat come, and I’ll tame him. Ned’ll see me a fair fight, won’t you Ned?”

“O yes, I’ll see you a fair fight; blast my old shoes if I don’t.”

“That’s sufficient, as Tom Haines said when he saw the elephant; now let him come.”

Thus they went on with countless oaths and with much that I could not distinctly hear. In mercy’s name, I thought, what a band of ruffians is at work here. I quickened my gait and had come nearly opposite the thick grove, whence the noises proceeded, when my eye caught, indistinctly through the foliage of the scrub oaks and hickories that intervened, glimpses of a man or men who seemed to be in a violent struggle. Occasionally, too, I could catch those deep-drawn, emphatic oaths which men utter when they deal heavy blows in conflict. As I was hurrying to the spot, I saw the combatants fall to the ground, and after a short struggle I saw the uppermost one (for I could not see the others) make a heavy plunge with both his thumbs. At the same instant I heard a cry in the accent of keenest torture—“Enough, my eye is out.”

For a moment I stood completely horror-struck. The accomplices in this brutal deed had apparently all fled at my approach, for not a one was to be seen.

“Now blast your corn-shucking soul,” said the victor, a lad of about eighteen, as he arose from the ground, “come cuttin’ your shines ’bout me agin next time I come to the court-house will you? Get your owl-eye in agin if you kin.”

At this moment he saw me for the first time. He looked frightened and was about to run away when I called out—“Come back, you brute, and help me relieve the poor critter you have ruined forever.”

Upon this rough salutation he stopped, and with a taunting curl of the nose, replied. “You needn’t kick before you’re spurred. There an’t nobody here nor han’t been, nuther. I was just seeing how I could have fout.” So saying, he pointed to his plow, which stood in the corner of the fence about fifty yards from the battle ground. Would any man in his senses believe that a rational being could make such a fool of himself? All that I had heard and seen was nothing more nor less than a rehearsal of a knock-down and drag-out fight in which the young man had played all the parts for his own amusement. I went to the ground from which he had risen, and there were the prints of his two thumbs plunged up to the balls in the mellow earth, and the ground around was broken up as if two stags had been fighting on it.

As I resumed my journey, I laughed outright at this adventure, for it reminded me of Andrew Jackson’s attack on the United States bank. He had magnified it into a monster and then began to swear and gouge until he thought he had the monster on his back, and when the fight was over and he got up to look for his enemy, he could find none anywhere.