"Shadrach,—Shadrach," quavered out the old woman in a twitter of anxiety, "whut ye talkin' 'bout. Ye know ye ain't got no money—an' you ain't got no way—no way—ter git no money."
"Hesh that up, Mam," the son admonished her, "else you'll go deestracted, and eend yer days with a gag in yer mouth an' tied ter the bedpost."
"Cheese it, I tell you!" Lloyd confronted him angrily. "You will stow your tongue while I'm here or I'll give you what for. I'd floor you anyhow for a nickel, but you are too old for me to touch."
"S'pose you uns try me!" one of the young mountaineers beside the door stepped forth.
He was like unto the sons of Anak, gigantic of build, every movement informed with elasticity and vigour, and the others broke into a great guffaw, so slight by contrast, so girlishly dapper did Lloyd appear, with so rose pink a flush in his cheek as he stood on the hearth. But his eyes flashed at the challenge, and as the muscular young mountaineer approached, carefully eyeing him, he threw off his coat and "bunched his fives" without a moment's hesitation.
The rural giant's lunge was something frightful in its weighty impetuosity. The stranger side-stepped with lightning-like swiftness; his arm flew out in a sudden counter-stroke that landed with an impact like the click of a solid shot; the little cabin shook on its foundations and rang with a clatter that discounted the tumults of the storm as the young mountaineer "went to grass" with a precipitancy that left hardly an available muscle in his whole big body.
There were some capacities for the enjoyment of sport and a sense of fair play in the applause of the others, for Tom Pinnott showed that he was not seriously hurt by ruefully gathering himself together and sitting where he had fallen on the floor, sheepishly laughing and rubbing his shoulder.
"How on yearth, stranger," demanded old Shadrach Pinnott, who seemed to bear no grudge for the several smart admonitions as to his filial conduct which the young showman had administered, "How on yearth did ye ever contrive ter throw Tawm."
"Oh, I have had experience in the ring," said Lloyd, pulling on his coat. "I trained with a good prospect for the light-weight championship, but I gave it up. I don't like to fight. I have got the sand all right, but I have got to get my mad up to fight with any spirit. Now, what I like in a public performance is to show some kind of merit, you know, of fine flavour. I mean something pleasing—that don't hurt nobody, nor leave nobody in the lurch, nor make much of one man to destroy another's prospects. Competitions ain't my lay at all. Now, if I could choose I'd like to exhibit a song-and-dance such as this lydy here was enjoying in the orchard. That would hit the taste of the public, too—to a charm—to a charm."
He wagged his head with the emphasis of conviction. An exquisite bit of rusticity, he felt it to be, as refined, as delicate, as free from the rough edges of common country life, idealised because of the girl's grace and beauty, yet as genuinely bucolic as a pastoral poem or painting. He had begun to ply her with insistence. If the "lydies" would come down he would arrange so that it shouldn't cost them a cent. By fair rights she ought to be paid for dancing and singing, and as she cried out in amazed ridicule of the idea he assured her that in the outside world this happened every day. Ladies received money, legal tender, actual currency, for nothing but singing and dancing. "And few of them can do a turn like you," he declared. But because of his partner—and he paused to disclose to them in a voice of mystery the exceedingly pertinent fact that Captain Ollory of the Royal Navy, whose real name was Haxon, was a partner in the enterprise, and without his consent he dared not offer her money till she had been tried and the public captured.