“Well, I happen to be one.”
This answer took the blustering Sam rather aback. He thought that Ned had sought a chance to rest himself at the expense of the hotel’s hospitality. But it suited his purpose to appear incredulous.
“They don’t take in vagabonds here.”
It was more than flesh and blood could stand. Ned was about to leap to his feet when he was spared that trouble by the chair being yanked from under him, and he fell sprawling on the floor of the porch.
“Haw! haw! haw!” bawled Sam, in high good humor at seeing Ned in such an undignified position.
“Ho! ho! ho!” echoed half a dozen of Sam’s cronies, who had been passing with him when he had spied Ned, to whom Sam had taken an instinctive dislike. The “gang” had been invited by Sam to see the “fun.” If it had not been on the porch of his father’s hotel that Sam encountered Ned, he would have hesitated to try issues with him, for his experience of the morning had shown him that Ned, slender and rather delicate-looking as he was, was a foeman by no means to be despised. But on home grounds he felt safe.
He was rather taken aback, therefore, when Ned scrambled to his feet and advanced toward him instead of retreating, as the bully had expected Ned would do. There was a fire akindle in Ned’s eyes that Sam by no means liked, for he was at heart a coward, although accustomed to lording it over other boys of his own age not a little.
But with the eyes of his cronies fixed upon him expectantly, he felt that he could not retreat.
“What do you want?” he asked, in a voice that he tried to make belligerent, but which, somehow, did not hold quite the warlike note he would have liked.
“I want to give you something you need badly,” said Ned, without raising his voice, but there still glowed that same dangerous light in his eyes.