“Not until you’ve paid toll, dear,” he said, with nauseous significance.
It was well for him that Yvonne’s hands held nothing more formidable than a couple of bunches of honeysuckle. Had they held a whip or a switch it is possible that the pasty face of this cowardly cur might have been wealed in such wise as to last him for quite an indefinite time.
“Will you stand away from that gate, please? I repeat that I want to pass,” she said in even more staccato tone than before. Her blue eyes had grown steely, and there was a red flush in the centre of each cheek. She glanced furtively on the ground; if even she could find a stone for a weapon of defence; but the lane was soft and grassy, and stones there were none. But all the fellow did was to drop his elbows farther down over the top bar, so as to hold the gate more effectually.
“Not until you’ve paid toll, dear,” he repeated. “Come, now, don’t be disagreeable. It’s the rule of the road to take toll of a pretty girl when you let her through a gate. You’re only a kid, too, and I won’t give it away. Ooh—hah—hah!”
It would be impossible to convey an idea of the combined terror and anguish conveyed in the above shout. Equally impossible would it be, we fear, to convey the attitude struck, in sudden and swift transition, by him who uttered it. He bounded back from the gate like an india-rubber ball thrown against it, and with like velocity, for a tough and supple ground-ash stick had descended upon that part of his person which his forward lounge over the gate had left peculiarly suggestive of the purpose; and with lightning-like swiftness again the stick came down, conveying to the recipient some such sensation as that of being cut in half by a red-hot bar. One appalled glimpse of Wagram’s face, blazing with white wrath above him, and the terrified bounder, ducking just in time to avoid being seized by the collar, turned and fled down the road, quite regardless, in his blind panic, of abandoning his bicycle, which leaned against the hedge a few yards from the gate.
But for himself no more disastrous plan could he have conceived. Wagram had no intention of letting him down so easily, and sprang in pursuit, with the result that in about a moment he was flogging his victim along the road at the best pace that either could by any possibility put forward. At last the fellow lay down, and howled for mercy.
Giving him one final, pitiless, cutting “swish” as he rolled over, Wagram ceased.
“You crawling cur,” he said, still white with anger, and rather breathless with his exertion, “I won’t even give you the privilege of apologising. That is one reserved for some slight semblance of a man; but for a thing like you—Faugh!”
The thought seemed to sting him to such a degree of renewed ferocity that his face changed again. Fearing a renewal of the chastisement the cringing one fairly whimpered.
“You’ve nearly killed me,” he groaned. “I didn’t mean any harm, sir; it was only a bit of fun.”