“Between you and Absalom a man can’t do his chores in much peace,” calmly said Hiram, appearing in the tie-up door. He stepped into the yard, set the tip of a long-handled pitchfork in the ground, and leaned his shoulder against this support.
“You see that, do you?” yelled Willard, striding forward a few steps and putting a thick forefinger end on the scar. “That’s been there twenty-five years.”
“Let’s see. You’re Cap’n Klebe Willard, ain’t you?” inquired Hiram, affably. And a wordless shout answering him, he said:
“Yes, I know you and I know the mark, because I put it there myself for good reasons.” He looked around at the little group of spectators with an air of secure triumph.
“And you threw my poor old father over his own fence, you coward, when I wasn’t there to defend him. Now, Hime Look, you’ve got to meet a man and not a boy.”
He rolled his sleeves up from his hairy wrists.
“You’ve got to fight a man and fight him in order to pay a bill you’ve owed here in Palermo for a long time.”
Look still leaned on the pitchfork. “Put down your fork!” bawled the frenzied skipper, “I’m not one of your tame animals,” and without other preface he rushed at Hiram.
The showman had been watching him with his sound eye glowing redly, the glass one glaring impassively. At the skipper’s rush, with the facility an old circus man displays with a pitchfork, he shortened the handle in his grasp, speared one tine through the generous cartilage of Willard’s ear, and before that furious adversary fairly realised what had happened, he swung him on his heel, forced him back by the pain of the pierced ear, and then driving the tines into the side of the barn, set both fists on the end of the handle and had the frantic man a safe prisoner at the end of the fork. Willard writhed a few times, groaning as his ear tugged against the steel. Then he stood up, perforce as stiff as a soldier, and roared at Hiram all the billingsgate of a long coast “language-artist.” The grim captor simply glared at him until he had exhausted himself.
“A hyeny came at me in a cage once,” said the showman, reminiscently, in the first pause, “and I caught him just like this, and I held him till the fight was all out of him. Now, Klebe, you’ve come up here drunk as a fiddler’s hoorah and wantin’ to fight. You can’t fight with me to make a town spectacle. That’s what your father tried to do—make a town spectacle of me. I won’t stand for it. The Willard family can have all the trouble with me it’s lookin’ for, so far’s I’m personally concerned, but not in knock-downs. Those don’t settle things. You can see that for yourself. We fi’t twenty-five years ago, and here you are just as hot for it next time I see you.”