"No, I can't. If that parson hadn't come, I'd have licked you."
"Perhaps," said John.
"Isn't any perhaps about it. You look out, that's all."
John laughed. He was just now what the Squire described as horse-happy and indisposed to quarrel. "Suppose you wake up the old gentleman. He can snore."
Tom shook the doctor's shoulder, "Wake up, Dad. Here's John Penhallow."
The Doctor sat up and pulled off his handkerchief. The flies fell upon his bald pate. "Darn the flies," he said. "What is it, John?"
"My uncle wants you to come to Westways to-morrow and doctor old Josiah's rheumatism."
"I'll come."
"He wants you to look after Peter Lamb. He's been drinking again."
"What! that whisky-rotted scamp. It's pure waste of time. How the same milk came to feed the Squire and that beast the Lord knows. He has no more morals than a tom-cat. I'll come, but it's waste of good doctoring." Here he turned his rising temper on Tom. "You and my boy have been having a fight. You licked him and saved me the trouble. I heard from Mr. Rivers what Tom said."