"Cow-ward?" Vittorio broke off his song and beamed upon them with a flash of black eyes and white teeth. "How you mean, cow-ward? No understand."
"A coward," Peter patiently explained, "is a man who's afraid to fight—like you. Eye-talians are cowards. They don't dare stand up man to man an' take what's comin' to 'em. When they've got a grudge to pay, they creeps up in the night an' sticks a knife in yer back. That's bein' a coward."
The insulting significance of this escaped Vittorio, but he clung to the word delightedly. "Cow-ward, cow-ward," he repeated, to fix the syllables in his mind. "Nice word! Sank you." Then, as a glimmering of Peter's insinuation finally penetrated, he shook his head and laughed. The charge amused him. "Me no cow-ward!" he declared. "No afraid fight, but no like-a fight. Too hard work." He shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands. "More easy take care-a flower."
The subtlety of this explanation was lost upon Peter, and the two went their ways; the one happily engaged with his weeding and his pruning, the other looking on across the hedge contemptuously scornful.
Peter's ideal of the highest human attainment was to become a "true sport." His vocabulary was intensive rather than extensive, and the few words it contained meant much. The term "true sport" connoted all desirable qualities. Abstractly, it signified ability, daring, initiative, force; it meant that the bearer attacked the world with easy, conquering grace, and—surest test of all—that he faced defeat no less than success with a high heart. Concretely, a true sport could play polo and ride to hounds, could drive a motor-car or a four-in-hand or sail a boat, could shoot or swim or box. All of these things, and several others, Mr. Harry Jasper could do. It was from observing him that Peter's definition had gained such precision.
The billiard-room mantelpiece at Jasper Place held a row of silver cups, relics of Mr. Harry's college days. The hall at Jasper Place testified to Mr. Harry's prowess with the rifle. A moose head decorated the arch, a grizzly bear skin stretched before the hearth, and a crocodile's head plucked from the mud of its native Nile emerged grinning from the chimney-piece. Some day Mr. Harry was going to India after a tiger skin to put over the couch; in the meanwhile he contented himself with duck-shooting on Great South Bay, or an occasional dip into the Adirondacks.
Patrick had accompanied him on the last of these trips, and it had been a long-standing promise that Peter should go on the next. Their camp was to be in Canada this year, as soon as the open season for caribou arrived. Peter's heart was set on a caribou of his own, and as the summer wore to an end his practice with the rifle was assiduous.
Mr. Harry had set up a target down on the Jasper beach—a long strip of muddy gravel which the inlet, at low tide, left bare—and had given the men permission to shoot. One Saturday afternoon Patrick and Peter and Billy were gathered on the beach amusing themselves with a rifle and a fresh box of cartridges. The target was a good two hundred yards away. With a light rifle, such as the men were using, it was a very pretty shot to hit one of the outer rings, the bull's-eye, through anything but a lucky fluke, being almost impossible.
"Mr. Harry's givin' us a run for our money," Peter grumbled, after splashing the water behind the target several times in a vain attempt to get his range. "Ye'd better keep out, Billy. This ain't no easy steps for little feet."
But Billy, with his usual aplomb, insisted upon trying. After his second shot Peter derisively shouted: