'Bias, his back blocking the way, stood there confronting a young farmer: and the young farmer's face was red with a bull-fury.
"You damned trespasser!"
"Trespasser?" echoed 'Bias, squaring up. "What about your damned trespassing cattle?"
Mrs Bosenna stepped past Cai and flung herself between the combatants. Strange to say she ignored 'Bias, and faced the enemy, to plead with him.
"Mr Middlecoat, how can you be so foolish? He's as good as a prize-fighter!"
The young farmer stared and lowered his guard slowly.
"Your servant, ma'am! . . . A prize-fighter? Why couldn't he have told me so, at first?"
CHAPTER XIII.
FAIR CHALLENGE.
Again the two friends traversed back the valley road in silence: but this time they made no attempt to deceive themselves or to deceive one another by charging their constraint upon the atmosphere or the scenery. Each was aware that their friendship had a crisis to be overcome; each sincerely pitied the other, with some twinge of compunction for his own good fortune; each longed to make a clean breast—"a straight quarrel is soonest mended," says the proverb,—and each, as they kept step on the macadam, came separately to the same decision, that the occasion must be taken that very evening, when pipes were lit after supper. The reader will note that even yet, on the very verge of the crisis, Cai and 'Bias owned: