“It wasn’t me that came with a flag of truce.”
He snorted. “You’ll come one day with a cry for mercy.”
“Me! You’ll never see me at Frog Farm. I’d rather go to the poorhouse—to see you, I mean.”
Will set his teeth. “Very well then—my conscience is clear. I did think I might have been hard on you. But now——!”
“Now,” she echoed mockingly.
“I shall crush you.”
She laughed tauntingly “Pride goes before a fall.”
“I shall crush you without pity.”
“You young rapscallion!” It was the Gaffer hobbling back. Having lit the coach-lamps, he had lingered in voluptuous contemplation of what they illumined. But the noise of high words had reached him, and now with the astonishing muscularity that still lingered in his shrunken frame, the ancient seized the whip and wrenched it from Will’s grasp. Jinny flew between them, fearing he would strike as he stood there in prophetic fury, palpitating in his every limb. Her earlier intervention, though against a knife, had been comic: here was tragedy, she felt.
“You crush my Jinny! Why, Oi’ll snap ye in two like this whip.” And he hurled the pieces of the stock at Will’s feet.