"No, you don't—just you leave him be!" called out Eph Adamson, as the young man pushed the half-wit back from him, his own blue eyes now beginning to glint. "Leave him alone, unless you want to fight. He can lick you anyways, whoever you are. Do you want to fight?"
"No, why should I? I don't know you."
Don Lane turned toward the stranger, still frowning and somewhat wondering, but in no terror whatever.
"I don't know you neither, nor what you're doin' here, but you've got to fight or 'pologize," said Eph Adamson, arriving at this conclusion through certain mental processes of his own not apparent. "You got to have our consent to cross this here courtyard. This is my son John, and you shan't insult him."
"Get on away—step back," said Don Lane. "I guess it's all right, but let my mother and myself alone—we're just going home."
A sudden wave of rage and wonder, mingled, filled the soul of drunken Eph Adamson as his venom rose to the boiling point.
"Mother!" he half screamed, "your mother? Who're you? You're a pretty pair, you two, ain't you? She said her baby died twenty years ago. Did she have some more? Who're you? Mother?—Say, after all, are you the town's boy—coming pushing past my son with her—your mother! What do you mean? If you're her son, you ain't got no mother, nor no father neither."
And now there came a pause, an icy pause—icy it was, out there in the glare of the hot summer sun. These four who stood in view of all the village might have been statues for the time, so motionless, so tense was each.
Not many actually heard the words of old Eph Adamson—words wrung out of the bitterness of his own soul perhaps, but words intolerable none the less. None had heard the words of Aurora Lane and the young man as they had spoken previous to this. None guessed who the stranger was or might be—none but drunken Eph Adamson. But all could see what now happened.
For one instant the young man stood almost like a statue. Then with one sudden thrust of his fist he smote the old man full in the mouth, so swift and hard a blow that Adamson dropped prostrate, and for the time motionless.