And he was going on. Then the ruffian said, “The dorg ’ll take ye! Look alive, Bull!”
Jack, growing desperate, screamed back, “Let your whelp come!” and turned to face the brute.
“Sick!” said Duffer, cracking his whip, and the dog started.
Jack had in his hand a slender stick which he had picked up crossing the fields. Duffer laughed at it. “My dorg won’t mind a switch like that! Go in, Bull!”
But Jack had no thought of defending himself by striking blows with so slight a weapon. His long experience on the canal had taught him, as he afterwards said, “a trick worth two of that.”
“A TRICK WORTH TWO OF THAT.”
Boldly facing the cur as he came bounding towards him, he grasped the stick firmly near the ends with both hands, and, lifting it horizontally, held it before him, about as high as his breast. Bull, as Jack had expected, leaped up and seized it with his teeth; in which exposed position he received full in his stomach so sudden and well-directed a kick from Jack’s heavy farm-shoe, that he loosed his hold and rolled over, yelping, on the ground.
“Sick him! go in! tear him!” roared Duffer, running to the rescue.
The “dorg,” however, had had his courage quite kicked out of him with his breath, and nothing could induce him to renew the attack. Whining and limping, or rather crawling, he slunk back to his master, who gave him another fierce command to “go in” and “sick,” and lastly a sharp cut with the snake-like lash, which merely sent him yelping in the opposite direction. Then Duffer, infuriated, advanced upon Jack, flourishing his whip, exactly in the way the boy had persisted in going.