From the beginning Steve had evinced an insatiable appetite for books; he started in to devour everything upon which he could lay his hands, and the Hunter library was lined with well-stocked cases. But it was the history volumes which drew him most; with a fat tome upon his knees he would sit for hours in a corner upon the floor, his eyes glued to the pages. And one day, two weeks after the occurrence of the eggs, he came to Sarah with a shy question, a book in one hand. After she had caught the drift of his query, Sarah took the volume and found that he had been reading of the fabulous deeds of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. His breathless interest in the subject thrilled and warmed the tiny woman, for more than once she had asserted to her brother that his very bearing was that of a small and sturdy knight of old, and she explained and elaborated upon the printed text far more appealingly than she had had any idea was in her power.
Steve went back to his reading after she had finished, but ever and again that morning his eyes, blank with preoccupation, wandered from the type; ever and again his ears seemed to be straining to catch the echo of childish trebles from the yard beyond the hedge. And after dinner Caleb was astonished when the boy explained, a little awkwardly, that he was going over to Allison's grounds for a while. Allison himself passed Steve in the hedge gap and, with a word of greeting, stopped to shake hands with him gravely. So it came about that they were sitting together, Dexter and Caleb, smoking in silence, when Barbara Allison's first wild scream came shrilling to their ears. They waited, staring at each other until the riotous clamor which rose set them to running across the lawn. But the scene which met Caleb's eyes when he burst through the shrubbery froze him into immobility.
There was a seething pack of children around two writhing figures upon the ground; they were all shrieking in soprano panic—all save Garry Devereau. He, standing a little to one side, was smiling his queer, crooked, handsome smile, while Stephen O'Mara mauled the Honorable Archibald Wickersham with true riverman thoroughness, which meant the infliction of the greatest possible damage in the least possible time. An inscrutable sort of contempt curled his lips when Barbara Allison frantically begged him to rescue the small Britisher from the storm of fists—a man's contempt for another man who does not take his punishment in silence. For the howls of the Honorable Archie were louder and more piercing than the loudest of the hysterical little girls who were watching.
Caleb felt as a man feels who tries to run in a nightmare and cannot make his feet obey the commands of his brain. It was only when Barbara Allison dropped desperately to her knees beside the huddle of arms and legs and straining bodies and began to beat with tight-clenched little hands upon Steve's tousled head, that the power of action returned to him. He fairly leaped forward then, scattering the circle before his weighty rush and, leaning over to get a firm grip upon his collar, jerked Steve upright with one mighty heave. That effort raised the Honorable Archie to his feet, also, for Steve was clamped to his antagonist, or victim, with a bulldog grip.
It grew very quiet when Caleb whirled the boy around and stood peering sternly down into his battle-streaked features. Allison strode quietly up in that moment.
"Well?" Caleb didn't know just how to begin, but his voice was cold. "Well, young man, can you explain just what this means?"
The Honorable Archie limped away a pace or two and, whimpering, fell to rearranging his crumpled raiment—fell to dabbling at a bruised and swollen nose. When he found that there was blood upon his handkerchief he howled again, but the rest of the children waited, appalled, for Steve's answer.
Had the boy burst into bitter expletive at that instant Caleb would not have been so surprised as he was at Steve's reception of his question. The latter looked up, just pushed his long hair back from his forehead with one quick hand; and then smiled, very, very slowly.
"Nuthin'—nuthin' much," he qualified the statement. "Only we was goin' to play King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table! He wanted to be her knight"—an uncomplimentary thumb indicated the Honorable Archie—"and—and so did I." This time his eyes went to Barbara, who was listening, her teeth sunk in her lip. "He wanted to be her knight—an'—an' he ain't got no call to be, because in case of trouble, or anything, he couldn't purtect her! He couldn't fight good enough to take good keer o' her, because I kin fight better. I—I just licked him to prove it!"
And there the matter-of-fact explanation halted.