Ned Tone’s fingers were on Tom’s windpipe, and one of his knees was on the chest and the other in the pit of the stomach of the prostrate one, when Tom suddenly turned over on his face and humped himself like a camel. Tone felt a grip as of iron on both wrists, a cracking strain on the muscles of his arms and shoulders, and then a sense of general upheaval. His feet described an arc in the air and he struck the ground full-length with jarring force.
Tone got up slowly and saw Tom standing beside Catherine.
“You don’t know any more about wrestling than you do about boxing,” said Tom, pleasantly. “But even if you were trained you wouldn’t be much good, for all your weight and muscle—because you haven’t any spirit, any grit.”
Tone turned without a word and started slowly for the road that cut through the belt of forest and connected the new clearing with the older fields. The others followed him, Tom smiling and the girl still pale with indignation and scorn. Tone did not look around. As he passed close to the house, on his way to the road that led afar through the wilderness to Boiling Pot, Tom overtook him and suggested that he should rest awhile and have something to eat. Tone’s reply to the offer of hospitality would scorch the paper if written down. So Tom let him go. Tone turned at the edge of the woods and shook his fist.
Tom turned to Catherine, who had come up and halted beside him, and said, “He is so futile that I feel sorry for him.”
“He would be dangerous if he knew—but it is quite evident that he doesn’t know,” she said. “But he’ll do you some injury if he possibly can. I think he hates you. I am afraid I would not have let him off so easily if I had been in your place to-day, after that treacherous attack.”
“He doesn’t seem to like me, that’s a fact,” returned Tom, with a quiet smile. “I suppose it is natural that he should feel that way about me, for several reasons; and I am not sorry.”
Catherine glanced at him quickly, and the color was back in her cheeks.
“You are wonderfully good-natured,” she said, “and you seem to have a marvelous control of your temper. I can’t understand your striking that colonel.”
“My nerves are better than they were then,” he replied. “But even now—well, when it comes to a fellow like that saying that your dead friend was a coward!—but he was fat and out of condition, and I shouldn’t have hit him on the chin.”