Still he rose and opened his door at the moment it was giving way under the efforts of the obstinate visitor.
The secretary of the Gun Club bounded into the room.

A bomb would not have entered with less ceremony.
"Yesterday evening," exclaimed J.T.Maston _ex abrupto_, "our president was publicly insulted during the meeting! He has challenged his adversary, who is no other than Captain Nicholl! They are going to fight this morning in Skersnaw Wood! I learnt it all from Barbicane himself! If he is killed our project will be at an end! This duel must be prevented! Now one man only can have enough empire over Barbicane to stop it, and that man is Michel Ardan." Whilst J.T.Maston was speaking thus, Michel Ardan, giving up interrupting him, jumped into his vast trousers, and in less than two minutes after the two friends were rushing as fast as they could go towards the suburbs of Tampa Town.
It was during this rapid course that Maston told Ardan the state of the case.

He told him the real causes of the enmity between Barbicane and Nicholl, how that enmity was of old date, why until then, thanks to mutual friends, the president and the captain had never met; he added that it was solely a rivalry between iron-plate and bullet; and, lastly, that the scene of the meeting had only been an occasion long sought by Nicholl to satisfy an old grudge.
There is nothing more terrible than these private duels in America, during which the two adversaries seek each other across thickets, and hunt each other like wild animals.

It is then that each must envy those marvellous qualities so natural to the Indians of the prairies, their rapid intelligence, their ingenious ruse, their scent of the enemy.

An error, a hesitation, a wrong step, may cause death.