“Stop!” roared the little man in the butterfly necktie. “Put me out of my intellectual misery. Are you really the two tomfools I have read of in all the papers? Are you the two people who wanted to spit each other in the Police Court? Are you? Are you?”
“Yes,” said MacIan, “it began in a Police Court.”
The little man slung the bottle of wine twenty yards away like a stone.
“Come up to my place,” he said. “I've got better stuff than that. I've got the best Beaune within fifty miles of here. Come up. You're the very men I wanted to see.”
Even Turnbull, with his typical invulnerability, was a little taken aback by this boisterous and almost brutal hospitality.
“Why...sir...” he began.
“Come up! Come in!” howled the little man, dancing with delight. “I'll give you a dinner. I'll give you a bed! I'll give you a green smooth lawn and your choice of swords and pistols. Why, you fools, I adore fighting! It's the only good thing in God's world! I've walked about these damned fields and longed to see somebody cut up and killed and the blood running. Ha! Ha!”
And he made sudden lunges with his stick at the trunk of a neighbouring tree so that the ferrule made fierce prints and punctures in the bark.
“Excuse me,” said MacIan suddenly with the wide-eyed curiosity of a child, “excuse me, but...”
“Well?” said the small fighter, brandishing his wooden weapon.