Up on one's ear

When you got up on your ear and called me names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling, didn't I explain to you that all the whale-ships in the North Seas had been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years?

[H]e has been wronged, so he gets up on his ear, and he kicks like a two-year-old bay steer.

"He's right up on his ear," said Clint gloomily. "If he gets us now he will send us all packing, and don't you doubt it!"

I know a salesman of this sort who will never make his mark, who flares up, "gets up on his ear," as they say, when ever his sensitive, sore spots are touched.