There was an ominous pause. Every old student there knew Clifford to be one of the most skillful and dangerous boxers in the school.
They looked with admiration upon their countryman. It didn’t cost anything to admire him. They urged him on, and he didn’t need much urging, for he remembered his own recent experience as a new man, and he didn’t know Clifford.
“Go ahead,” cried this misguided student, “he’s a nouveau, and he’s going up!”
Clifford laughed in his face. “Come along,” he called, as some dozen English and American students pushed into the circle and gathered round the prostrate Englishman.
“See here, Clifford, what’s the use of interrupting?” urged a big Frenchman.
Clifford began loosening the straps. “You know, Bonin, that we always do interfere when it goes as far as this against an Englishman or an American.” He laughed good naturedly. “There’s always been a fight over it before, but I hope there won’t be any today.”
Bonin grinned and shrugged his shoulders.
After vainly fussing with the ropes, Clifford and the others finally cut them and the “nouveau” scrambled to his feet and took an attitude which may be seen engraved in any volume of instruction in the noble art of self-defense. He was an Englishman of the sandy variety. Orange-colored whiskers decorated a carefully scrubbed face, terminating in a red-brown mustache. He had blue eyes, now lighted to a pale green by the fire of battle, reddish-brown hair, and white hands spattered with orange-colored freckles. All this, together with a well made suit of green and yellow checks, and the seesaw accent of the British Empire, answered, when politely addressed, to the name of Cholmondeley Rowden, Esq.
“I say,” he began, “I’m awfully obliged, you know, and all that; but I’d jolly well like to give some of these cads a jolly good licking, you know.”
“Go in, my friend, go in!” laughed Clifford; “but next time we’ll leave you to hang in the air for an hour or two, that’s all.”