BOOK OF FIGHTS AND OF THE BIG FIGHT.
THE ELEMENT OF COURAGE
CHAPTER I
BOSS MADDOX SHOWS HIS HAND
I
Ima asked: "Of what are you thinking, Percival?"
"Of when I shall leave you all—and how."
She replied: "Strange, then, how thoughts run. It was in my mind also."
Stranger how tricks and chances of life go! This trick and that—and this was to be his last night with the van folk. That chance and this—and within a few hours he was to be returned to Aunt Maggie, bade good-by at the close of his visit scarcely four months since. This trick and that, that chance and this, and he was to be put in the way of winning Dora—a way that never had seemed so obscure, never so impossible of attainment as when he came back to Japhra with her "I have not forgotten," at once shouting to him that she loved him and mocking him with the difference between her estate and his.
Already the tricks and chances were afoot. He was alone with Ima upon a rising bluff of common land. Considerably below them, so that they looked down as it were from a cliff to a valley, the fair was pitched and in full swing—that it was in full swing and he idle was the first step in the freakish hazards that were to encompass him this night.
II