"The trick of being a gentleman," I answered him slowly, my face red with anger at Singleton's foolishness, "I never learned at all. But to toss a poor drunken fool like that over one's head any boy might learn at school."
"No," said my quasi-minister of the gospel, emphatically, "I differ with you. Your time was perfect. You made him do the work, not yourself. Tell me, are you a skilled wrestler?"
I was nettled now at all these things which were coming to puzzle and perturb an honest fellow out for a morning ride.
"Yes," I answered him, "since you are anxious to know, I'll say I can throw any man in Fairfax except one."
"And he?"
"My father. He's sixty, as I told you, but he can always beat me."
"There are two in Fairfax you cannot throw," said Orme, smiling.
My blood was up just enough to resent this challenge. There came to me what old Dr. Hallowell at Alexandria calls the "gaudium certaminis." In a moment I was little more than a full-blooded fighting animal, and had forgotten all the influences of my Quaker home.
"Sir," I said to him hotly, "I propose taking you home with me. But before I do that, and since you seem to wish it, I am going to lay you on your back here in the road. Frankly, there are some things about you I do not like, and if that will remedy your conceit, I'm going to do it for you—for any sort of wager you like."
"Money against your horse?" he inquired, stripping to his ruffled shirt as he spoke. "A hundred guineas, five hundred?"