His voice was a trifle loud; but Lawrence spoke very low as he answered, distinctly, "How do you do, Mr. Meramble?"
"Never was better in my life, thanks. I owe you one. Sometimes I have a fancy to pay my debts—as now."
There was quite a theatrical air about the man as he spoke; indeed, his appearance usually savored of the melodrama.
"Ah! That so?" said Lawrence, calmly. He was thinking, "That fellow knows that people know I flung him in."
He had barely time to finish this thought when Meramble started forward and swung his dog-whip square across Lawrence's face. Lawrence felt a stinging blindness that confused him and made him reel for the instant. And he could not gather himself before something else had come upon him. Meramble's dog was at his throat; the brute had fastened himself there and was swinging by his hold.
There was a rush, a shouting, a scramble of several men forward to get the dog off.
Meramble stood back and looked on; he was still smiling with a glitter of black eyes and white teeth.
Somebody got hold of the dog's legs. But somebody else was nearer still, and in the utter confusion in Lawrence's senses he yet heard a voice say, sharply, "No! no! His throat! His throat!"
And all the time he himself was trying to find the dog's throat; but he was like a man whose hands would not obey him. The stroke so near his eyes had cut like a knife, and his brain was still reeling from it, and from the onset of the dog.
But he thought he recognized the voice crying out thus; and, curiously, in the hurrying blackness of the moment he was aware that he inhaled the odor of iris.