Choked for words by the flame's fierce leap and burn, "Clear out of this!" Percival said.
Foxy Pinsent turned his head slowly from Ima to Percival and looked Percival coolly up and down with the foxy smile. He put his elbows back to lean against the van, and very deliberately crossed one foot over the other. "Go to hell, won't you?" he said mildly.
It was a double smart he took to wipe the studied insolence from his face and to plant venom there. Percival's open hand that struck his mouth—a tough, vicious jolt with the arm half-crooked, a boxer's hit—drove his head against the van; and his "Ah, curse you!" followed the sharp smack and thud quick as if the three sounds—clip, thud, hiss—belonged to some instrument discharged.
He sprang forward, head back, hitting quickly with both hands, like the rare boxer he was—feinted with his right, drove his left against Percival's forehead, took a sharp one-two! on mouth and throat, and they were engaged, fighting close, fighting hard, and savage and glad, and fierce and exultant, each of them, at last to spring their common hate.
In its suddenness and fury, in its briefness and the manner of its check, the thing was like the sudden woof! of flame of a spark to a handful of gunpowder. There is the belch and blinding flash of heat, then the thick cloud of smoke. There was the swift drum of blows, then the rush of feet—Stingo, Japhra, Boss Maddox, men from here, men from there, in that trap-door swiftness with which commotion throws up a crowd—and the two were grasped and pulled apart and held apart, struggling like terriers that have had the first taste of blood and to collect the glut are gone blind to blows or authority.
Stingo from behind threw his two immense arms about Percival and leant with all his weight the better to lock them. Boss Maddox thrust his tall form before Pinsent, and snatched a wrist and gripped it in his long fingers. Japhra was at Percival's hands that tore at Stingo's.
"Lay on here, some of you!" Boss Maddox called, struggling with Pinsent's arm. "Get that other arm!—Dago! Frenchy! Jackson! Darkie! Look alive with it! Drop it, Foxy! Drop it! What the devil's up with you?"
And Stingo's strained whispers, in jerks and gusts by reason of his exertions: "Easy, Percival! Easy with it! Easy, I say! You can't shift me, boy! Get that hand, Japhra! Get that hand!"
Then the smoke clears and there remains only the acrid smell of the burning, and the sense of heat.
The two were dragged apart till a safe space separated them and they fronted each other before the groups about them—their faces furious, their bodies still, but their hands plucking at the hands that held them as they made their answers.