Adventure came with the rougher element that rattled down in hired carriages to the inn, chi-hiking and using squalid language along the highroad on their week-end outing from London city. Cockney youth, with fantastic picturesque tendencies as to dress, and crude love in the wagonettes, descended to the ground, alighting before the inn, and swarmed into the drinking-bar, thirsty with the swallowing of dust and much shouting, buxom beauty hanging upon their arms with proud gaze boldly cast upon their noisy lords from under the heavy hair that shaded their frankly vulgar eyes, and with ear-racking laughings from their full red lips to greet all their swaggering gentlemen’s uttermost ribaldries.
Inflamed by beauty, cockney youth was on the strut, well-inclined to debauch; and much beer did the rest.
They made the inn a riot of vulgarity.
Yet, all had gone well till twilight, and had as likely enough gone well to the hour of their home-going—and they were already foregathering in the tap-room for the drinking of the last glass—had it not been for the garrulous and boastful habit of the gardener of the inn, a red-bearded fellow of weak knees and splay feet, who got to bragging about the inn’s ostler. However, a cockney youth, a clean-limbed, quick-eyed cub, being grown something tongue-loosed by reason of the beer, at once brought out his conceit and paraded it—it also had to do with some little parochial honour in which he was held with regard to the skilful use of his naked hands—he had made some tough fellow’s nose bleed or arrived at the like godlike achievement. He thought himself a match, he said, for any fellow that messed about horses. This with prodigious blasphemies. Whereat the red-bearded gardener laughed loudly; and the cockney youth, fired with wrath, hit at the centre of the laugh, and missing the gardener’s mouth, the which was no such difficult job for the tangled thicket of red hair about the laugh, got his clumsy knuckles somewhere in the region of the gardener’s nose and set the blood flowing.
The barman called for order, and the cockney youth, forgetting the impiety of mishandling the authority of the chair, got his five fingers into the potman’s neck-cloth.
Then it was seen that Sim Crittenden, the ostler, stopping in the midst of the deep note of Nazareth, walked blithely out of the stables on light springy feet, passed along the highroad before the inn, and swung open the outer door of the drinking-bar.
He stood before them that brawled in the tavern and grimly eyed the riot.
“Who undid the potman’s necktie?” he asked in a deep growl.
The cockney youth turned and put out his chin. He said he didn’t give a ruddy geranium who did it, but he was sober enough to take the whole responsibility of the humours of his particular wagonette on his own naked shoulders. He personally detested the potman’s taste in ties.
The ostler knocked him down.