"I—what could I say?"
"Why, you could ha' stopped their mouths—you could ha' told them they needn't stick their faces in it—that I was a better man, navy or no navy, than either o' them—you could ha' told them that they were both bug-house, an' they are,—you could ha' knocked them both down with one hand, and rolled them up together, and dropped them over the side of the porch. If it hadn't been so close on to the time for the dive and the tussle might ha' shook my nerve I'd ha' done it myself."
Lloyd looked at him with an infinite compassion, as he thus worked himself into a red-hot rage. The subjection in which Haxon must needs hold himself to the Moloch-like feat that so jeopardised his life, yet by which he lived indeed, had hardly less constraint for his confrère who so felt for his plight. Doubtless it was this which so sharpened Lloyd's acute expedients.
"Why, I wouldn't have touched them for the world," he declared, and as Haxon gazed at him speechlessly, and curiously, "they had no idea who you are."
Haxon could only lift the handbill and point at the significant words "Captain Ollory—Royal Navy—High Dive;" he did not utter a syllable.
"Well, you ain't labelled—are you? You ain't got a tag marked 'Captain Ollory' tacked on to you anywheres that I can see. They never dreamed it was you—else they wouldn't have said a word. They ain't a rude sort."
Haxon took this in doubtfully, his breath still fast, his face still scarlet and dripping. "I don't know about that," he averred, the insults to the name and the feat he represented still rankling deep.
"I know they never dreamed it—nobody would ever take you for a showman in this world. You look like something in the heavy commercial line."
Haxon drew a long breath; he had a sense that this was true, and as the hour for his ordeal was drawing so near he would fain calm himself with the realisation that there had been no insult to be resented.
"You are the image of a drummer of the heavy wholesale lay, white goods salesman, I should say. I don't know what I look like," Lloyd declared, "but I am sure they never took you for a showman."