Good manners can save your life.
This is a lesson never learned by Mr. Joseph P. Underhill out of New York City.
He and several of his friends drove up through Cross, evidently on their way to Boston. They decided, for some reason, to stop just outside my property. Leaving their car on the road, they came onto my land, found a good spot near one of the creeks, and sat down for lunch.
The ravens told me the men were there, and they told me the men didn’t seem as though they were going to be leaving any time soon.
Neither option was pleasing to me.
I took a stroll out to where the men were, and I found them sprawled out, and Mr. Joseph P. Underhill was plucking a can of beer out of the stream. There were others in the water, cooling off, and when I asked the men what they were doing on my property, their response was to laugh at the question.
I didn’t ask the question in a humorous way. Nor did I think it warranted a humorous response.
Underhill was the spokesman of the group, and he informed me that it was none of my damned business what they were up to, and that I should go on back to my ‘hovel,’ as he called it.
His friends thought that was incredibly funny, and he added a few more choice remarks regarding my parentage and dubious intellectual abilities.
I shot his three friends dead, then I put a round through each of Underhill’s knees. As he screamed and pleaded for his life, I dragged him back to the stream and took a can of beer out of the water. Keeping one eye on him, I pulled the tab, took a drink, and then thrust his head, face down, into the water.
I let him up every few seconds until I finished the beer, and then, I didn’t let him up anymore.
The worst of it all was that the beer wasn’t that good.
