"I should like to explain—" began Mr. Puddlebox.
"I'll explain you!" roared the wagoner. "I'll explain you, my beauty! Are you coming down off out of it?"
"What are you going to do if I do come?" inquired Mr. Puddlebox.
The carter, in a voice whose violence seemed likely to throttle him, announced as his intention that he proposed to cut out Mr. Puddlebox's liver with his whip and then, having extracted it, to dance upon it.
"Well, I won't come," said Mr. Puddlebox. "In that case, I think I'll stay here," he said, and said it with a nervous little giggle that shot out of the wagoner an inarticulate bellow of fury and a half-dozen of terrific blows towards Mr. Puddlebox's anxious face.
"Come down off out of it!" bellowed the carter. "I'll cut your liver out before I have my blinkin' hair cut, my beauty."
The same nervous giggle again escaped the unfortunate beauty whose liver was thus passionately demanded. "But your hair doesn't want cutting," said Mr. Puddlebox, "really—hup!"
"You fool!" Mr. Wriford cried. "You utter fool!" and in dramatic illustration of Mr. Puddlebox's folly, the wagon began to shake with the violence of the wagoner's ascent of it, and there preceded the ascent, increasing in horror as it approached, an eruption of astoundingly distressing oaths mingled in the most blood-curdling way with references to liver and other organs which were to be subjected at one and the same time to step-dances and to a ferocious orgy of surgical and cannibalistic practices.
Mr. Wriford was frightened. There went out of him the reckless glee in mad adventure that had possessed him on the wagon till now. There returned to him, dreadfully as if a hand within him were tugging at his vitals, twirling in his brain, drumming in his heart, the coward fear that well of old he knew.
"Down!" cried Mr. Puddlebox. "Down behind, loony! quick!" and began to scramble backwards.