"Hully gee!" breathed Pete into Mame's convenient ear. "Did yer pipe de way bo upper-cut 'im? Gee!"
Ash-Can Sam was wounded—not so much in body as in pugilistic pride. He turned to wipe away the stain, and, incidentally, to wipe the earth with the body of a foreign cat. This time he came in, swearing, and the two cats reared upon their haunches with the shock; then fell in a tangled, rending, yowling snarl. Omar Ben, by instinctive craft, sought for a point of vantage underneath his foe—a vantage because, when lying on his back, he could claw straight up with all four feet, and the greater the weight of the chap on top, the greater his woe—abdominally.
This point of vantage, however, is rather difficult to hold, with two most earnest gentlemen desirous of it; and so they changed positions—changed so rapidly, in fact, that their bodies resembled a sort of pyrotechnic pinwheel whose centrifugal sparks were composed of eyes and claws and tufts of fur and cat profanity. Also, it lasted longer than the ordinary pinwheel, and was a trifle more uproarious; but it died at last with a sizzling spit, and a lean black streak shot out toward the haven of an alley's mouth.
The streak was Ash-Can Sam. Omar Ben Sufi sat down in the middle of the street, and wondered. He had thrashed something, and he didn't understand it. So he just sat there, quivering, bleeding, battered—but a conqueror.
Ringtail Pete endeavored to express himself, but emotion choked him; therefore he spat fervidly and said:
"Hully gee!"
Then he and the ladies descended from the roof, to walk in silent circles around the champion, regarding him with a species of cataleptic awe. Presently, however, Pete came to earth, extended his paw, and delivered himself of an established truth:
"Well, dang my hide, but it takes er 'ristercrat fer to glitter in a scrap!"
They escorted him all the way to his eighty-thousand-dollar home. The ladies kissed him—both of them—and helped him to clamber weakly over his garden wall.
He turned to Ringtail with an easy, aristocratic smile: "Au revoir, R.T.! Those frawgs were most delicious!"