Gleazen grumbled something far down in his throat, and I cried out that I would fight him then as well as any time.
"If a couple of lanterns were slung from the rigging," Matterson suggested. He moved slowly and now and then touched the hot skin around his wound; but although it still troubled him, he appeared to be gaining strength.
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when two men came running aft in response to Captain North's sharp order. Lanterns were lighted and slung, and Cornelius Gleazen and I, with sword in hand, faced each other across a length of clean white deck.
It was a long way from friendly combat on the village green at Topham to the bout I now waited to begin, and both for Cornelius Gleazen and for myself the intervening months had piled up a formidable score to be settled. Waiting in silence for our seconds, Arnold and Matterson, to clear away some coiled ropes, we watched each other with a bitter hate that had been growing on his part, I am convinced, since the days when first he had seen me working in my uncle's store, and on mine, certainly, ever since I had become aware of the growing conviction that the friendship he had so loudly professed for me was absolutely insincere.
He had cheated, robbed, browbeaten, and, to all practical ends, killed, my uncle. He stood there now, scheming by every means in his power to kill and rob me in my turn. And if he succeeded!—I thought of the girl to whom Gideon North had given up his stateroom. How much did she know of all that was going forward? There had been only one door between her and the quarrel in the cabin. And what fate would be left for her, if I should fall—if Gleazen should override Gideon North and Arnold Lamont? Truly, I thought, I must fight my best.
"And, sir," I heard Arnold saying, "if you are able to bear arms after your bout with Mr. Woods, it is to be my turn and you shall so favor me."
"That I will," Gleazen replied with a wry smile.
I know truly, although I do not understand the reason for it, that after an unusually dramatic experience it is likely to be some trifling, irrelevant little thing that one remembers most vividly. And singularly enough it is a tiny patch on Arnold's coat that I now most clearly recall of all that happened then. I noticed it for the first time when Arnold was speaking; I do not remember that I ever noticed it again. Yet to this day I can see it as clearly as if I had only to turn my head to find it once more before my eyes, slightly darker than the body of the coat and sewed on with small neat stitches.
Now Arnold was beside me. "Steady your blade, my boy," he said. "Fence lightly and cautiously."