Avery stood hesitating.
“Hop along,” roared the showman, giving the man a push. “You’ve been whinin’ that you didn’t want trouble here. Now get into the game and stop it. You can inform Klebe Willard—for I reckon that’s him tackin’ up this way—that when he steps his foot onto the Look place he’s steppin’ onto a proposition that has the burnin’ deck laid away in the ice-box. Tell him I said so.”
Hiram left the road and went into the big barn.
The other came on more rapidly now, with a shout that was something like a jeer. He violently bumped the entreating Avery from his path and strode into the Look yard, the retinue following at a distance.
The new arrival set his sturdy legs wide apart, threw his cloth cap on the ground, and bellowed:
“Come out here in the fair and open, where there’s sea-room, you old woodchuck! Come out and see the mark I’ve lugged for twenty-five years.”
He slapped his hand against his cheek where a scar showed its wrinkled whiteness across his flushed, brown face.
“Come out!” he bawled.
“Crack ’em down, gents,” squawked the parrot, and he seized a bar of the cage in his beak and rattled away vigorously.
“Come out!” Willard kept shouting, stamping about on the turf. “If you ain’t turned coward as well as skin-game thief, come out!” The parrot interspersed in these invitations his raucous cries.