"Now, friends," says Bognár Laczi to the Velencze contingent, "what say you to some music? We have brought our own piper and a cornet-player with us, so I propose that we take it in turns; first your gipsies shall play, and then our musicians."
"All right," agreed the others, and thereupon the noble representative from Bicske had his favourite tune played on the bagpipes.
"I've a house and a sweet little wife of my own,
And bread and bacon and crops that I've grown."
And everything progressed smoothly, for while the music was going on, no one could talk, and if one guest called to someone else at the other table, he did not forget to address him as "noble friend." But at the second round of wine the company began to sing with the music, and it was not easy to stop their efforts. Finally, the two parties insisted on singing different songs at the same time, the result being an uproar, wherein cymbal, fiddle, bagpipe, and cornet strove for precedence in a very rivalry of tumultuous discord.
The Velencze leader could not stand such an annoyance, and he promptly hurled an empty bottle at the wall just above the head of the Bicske chief, so that the fragments fell on the latter's head. He then seized his axe, struck the beam with it, and cried out defiantly, "Let's see who is the better man?"
The valorous Bicske men and their ten Velencze companions, were equally ready to join in the fray thus begun. So they seized their axes and clubs, and began to brandish these in a highly menacing fashion. For there is no fighter like your Magyar when his blood is up.
At this perilous juncture appeared the representatives of peace and arbitration, in the person of Sir Stephen Keö, the "Knight of Kadarcs," and his companion, Mr. Postmaster Leányfalvy, who led between them Mathias Ráby, and presented him to the company.
The old campaigner, with his shabby sheepskin over his shoulders, and a short pipe between his teeth, pressed into the ranks of the combatants as calmly as if the Geneva Red Cross had sheltered his breast. Not a bit intimidated by the uproar, he brandished his pike, and cried out in a shrill voice:
"So you are at it again, are you! Be quiet, you fellows; and so early too, for you can't have drunk much yet. But listen to me, friends. This gallant gentleman whom you see here is Mr. Mathias Ráby of Rába and Mura, the son of the late Stephen Ráby, that noble patriot, who so often stood up for Magyar rights. During his absence from home some bullies in Szent-Endre have ejected this noble gentleman from his own house, and occupied it. Now he calls upon us, the patriots of Velencze and Bicske, to come to his aid, and will pay us a salary of two gulden per head, to drive out the illegal occupiers from his lawful domicile. Therefore I suggest that you adjourn your mutual quarrel till the next Stuhlweissenburg fair (and chalk it up so that you do not forget it); but meantime, come with us, and help to right the wrong done him."
Whereupon the twenty men present cheered loudly and signified their readiness to go.