“I'll fight,” he said, “for what I've got to fight for, but not for a darned thing else. Not a darned thing.”
“But you would fight,” smiled the duke, grimly. “Did you happen to remember that blood like that has come down to you? It was some drop of it which made you `hot in the collar' over that engaging savage roaring and slashing about him for his `bit of England.”'
Tembarom seemed to think it out interestedly.
“No, I did not,” he answered. “But I guess that's so. I guess it's so. Great Jakes! Think of me perhaps being sort of kin to fellows just like that. Some way, you couldn't help liking him. He was always making big breaks and bellowing out `The Wake! The Wake!' in season and out of season; but the way he got there—just got there!”
He was oddly in sympathy with “the early savages here,” and as understandingly put himself into their places as he had put himself into Galton's. His New York comprehension of their berserker furies was apparently without limit. Strong partizan as he was of the last of the English, however, he admitted that William of Normandy had “got in some good work, though it wasn't square.”
“He was a big man,” he ended. “If he hadn't been the kind he was I don't know how I should have stood it when the Hereward fellow knelt down before him, and put his hands between his and swore to be his man. That's the way the book said it. I tell you that must have been tough—tough as hell!”
From “Good-bye, Sweetheart” to “Hereward the Last of the English” was a far cry, but he had gathered a curious collection of ideas by the way, and with characteristic everyday reasoning had linked them to his own experiences.
“The women in the Hereward book made me think of Lady Joan,” he remarked, suddenly.
“Torfreda?” the duke asked.
He nodded quite seriously.