"Gloves?" he called.
Pinsent answered him. Pinsent took his hands from the pockets of his coat and curved up two brown fists. "There's no gloves between us," he called back; and at his words the two groups of spectators drew as it were one long breath of relish—"Ah-h-h!" that hardened to murmurs of grim satisfaction, each man to his neighbour—"The raw 'uns!" "The knuckle!" "The knuckle!" "The raw 'uns!" and broke into individual bickerings, cries of derision, across the ring; and thence into a sudden wordless shouting, one party against the other—a blaring vent of old antagonism fermented by new cause that made the animals in the menagerie cages at the end of the arena leap from uneasy slumber to spring against their bars and join their chorus to a chorus brutish as their own.
II
To a renewed outburst of that clamour—the thing was on the tick of beginning—Ima raised the flap that covered the entrance to the marquee and stepped within. Simultaneously the shouting stilled with a sudden jerk that left an immense silence—Foxy Pinsent had stepped into the ring.
She stopped as if the sudden stillness struck her; and she took in the scene, her hands clasped against her breast.
The ring had been contrived within the inner circle that forms the working part of a circus arena. The canvas belt, some two feet high, that surrounded this circle during a performance, had been taken up as to the arc farthest from where she stood and brought forward to the great pole of the marquee. The wide half circle thus bounded was made the ring for the fight. Around the tent the lights above the seats had been extinguished; the great lamp of many burners that encircled the mast enclosed the ring in its arc of clear light. In the surrounding dimness, as Ima paused and watched, were the high tiers of red-draped, empty benches. Within the light's arc she saw the rival crowds on either hand; straight before her the gap that separated the two clusters and declared their enmity. At the centre front of each, against the canvas that bounded the ring, was a little caving-in of the throng where men in their shirt-sleeves knelt. Pinsent had just stepped out from this knot on the one side: in the other she saw Percival seated on her father's knee. A hundred men and more were behind Pinsent, behind Percival forty or fewer; there was significance in how each throng stood closely packed, refusing the accommodation that the ample space between them offered—hatred was deep that preferred the discomfort of jostling and tiptoe standing to easier view at the price of mingling. Every face was beneath a peaked cap or dented bowler hat and above a scarfed neck; a pipe in most caused, as it were, a grey, shifting bank of smoke, cut flat by the darkness above the lamp's reflection, to be swaying above the caps as though they balanced it. Here and there were clumps of colour where women in blouses of red or white clustered together. Sweat, for the place was hot, glistened on this face and on that as if the grey, shifting bank above them exuded drops of water. There was something very sinister, very eerie, in the complete silence that for a moment held the scene; and Ima started to hear a sound of breathing and of restless movement. She looked around. On either hand of where she stood the menagerie cages were banked. Dark or tawny forms were coiled or stretched there; in one cage was a big wolf, head down, nose at the bars, that watched the light as she watched it.
She went quickly forward to where she saw her father. Impatient way was made for her. Japhra was talking earnestly to Percival, and they scarcely seemed to notice her. She slipped down beside them, her knees against the canvas, and sat on her heels, her hands clasped at their full extension. She had said she would not come. She had found she must. While she had been with Percival waiting Japhra's return after the scene with Pinsent he had begun the contrition he had come to her to express. She suffered him nothing of it. "That is left where we laid it among the bracken," she told him. "Let it abide there. Look already what has come of it. If I had stayed with thee, this had not happened."
But her leaving him, and why she left, and his following her, and what came then, were of the train of the tricks and chances that shaped for him this day.
III
Boss Maddox spoke. "They're going to fight," he said, taking up a position against the mast and addressing the gathering in his dry, authoritative way—"They're going to fight, and you can count yourselves lucky to see it. If any one interferes—out he goes. Everything's settled. If any one sees anything he don't think right or according to rule he can go outside and look for it—keep his mouth shut while he's going and go quick. Three minute rounds. One minute breathers. Ten count for the knock-out. Stingo 'll stand here with the watch. I'm referee. And I'm boss—bite on that. Come along, Foxy."