“Will I?” he mocked. “Who’s going to make me do it?”
Leigh, white with passion now, flashed scorn upon him.
“I will! You can’t say things like that about my brother’s wife!”
Corwin stared at him, still laughing; then he lowered his feet to the floor and rose. Standing, he overtopped the slender Carter boy by half a head.
“Your brother’s wife, eh?” he sneered. “Look here, child, you go home and eat your supper. Don’t you get worked up over Fanchon. I’ve known the lady quite a spell. If I whistled”—Mr. Corwin threw his head back and walked across the room toward Leigh, flushed with liquor, truculent, intolerable—“if I whistled, she’d run off with me to-morrow. I don’t because”—he came closer to Leigh now, laughing and sneering, insult in every line of his coarse, flushed face—“because I don’t want her!”
Leigh swung around and faced him, shaking with rage.
“You lie!” he cried hoarsely.
Corwin only laughed boisterously.
“You fool kid, you don’t know the lady. She——”
He leaned over, thrust his face close to Leigh’s and whispered. The boy sprang back.