Gilroy led on his horse without answering.
"Have you got the pluck of a louse?" the overseer sang into his ear. Gilroy was trembling, but he turned as they reached the stable.
"Take off your coat, then," said he, doggedly; "I'll leave mine inside."
Gilroy led his horse into the stable. Instead of taking off his coat, however, Tom Chester stood waiting with his arms akimbo and his eyes upon the open stable-door.
"Aren't you going to take it off?" said an eager yet nervous voice at his side. "Don't you mean to fight him after all?"
It was the piano-tuner, whose desire to see the manager soundly thrashed was at war with his innate dread of anything approaching a violent scene. He could be violent himself when his blood was up, but in his normal state the mere sound of high words made him miserable.
"Hulloa! I didn't see that you were there," remarked Chester, with a glance at the queer little figure beside him. "Lord, yes; I'll fight him if he's game, but I won't believe that till I see it, so we'll let him strip first. The fellow hasn't got the pluck of—— I knew he hadn't! That's just what I should have expected of him!"
Before Engelhardt could realize what was happening, a horse had emerged from the shadow of the stable-door, a man's head and wide-awake had risen behind its ears as they cleared the lintel, and Gilroy, with a smack of his whip on the horse's flank and a cut and a curse at Tom Chester, was disappearing in the dusk at a gallop. Chester had sprung forward, but he was not quick enough. When the cut had fallen short of him, he gathered himself together for one moment, as though to give chase on foot; then stood at ease and watched the rider out of sight.
"Next time, my friend," said he, "you won't get the option of standing up to me. No; by the Lord, I'll take him by the scruff of his dirty neck, and I'll take the very whip he's got in his hand now, and I'll hide him within an inch of his miserable life. That's the way we treat curs in these parts, d'ye see? Come on, Engelhardt. No, we'll stop and see which road he takes when he gets to the gate. I can just see him opening it now. I might have caught him up there if I'd thought. Ah! he's shaking his fist at us; he shall smell mine before he's a day older! And he's taken the township track; he'll come back to the shed as drunk as a fool, and if the men don't dip him in the dam I shall be very much surprised."
"And Miss Pryse is going to marry a creature like that," cried Engelhardt, as they walked back to the house.