“I sit here,” was Crapaud’s retort. “Make what you can of that.”
Brent made so little of it that he took Crapaud by the collar and transferred him to the street. The little man had no more strength than a half-grown chicken, and he went quietly enough.
But he swore at Ledoux.
“Here, you are a pretty pal; you are bigger than he is.”
Ledoux glanced at Brent, and fidgeted his hands in his pockets, but he did not attack.
“Well, we have found them out, haven’t we?”
“Name of a dog—but—I—found them in!”
They went off quarrelling up the street.
Other and more sinister incidents enlarged and filled in the outlines of the feud that was growing in Beaucourt. There was the affair of the Bois du Renard, an outrage that made old Anatole Durand go down and deliver a speech in the Place de l’Eglise. A few nights later there was a scrimmage in the Rue Bonnière in which young François Guiveau had his jaw broken. It was followed by the incident of the attack on Luce Philipon as she was walking home alone in the dark along the Rosières road. Her father had gone to meet her, and he caught the two louts trying to drag the girl into a field. The blacksmith was a very powerful man, and he beat both these young roughs senseless with his fists. One of them had tried to knife him, and Beaucourt never forgot that picture of Philipon trailing the lout by the arm all the way up the Rue de Picardie and along the Bonnière road to the factory. There was a crowd outside Bibi’s buvette, but no one tried to rescue the trailing, bumping figure. Philipon threw the fellow over the factory gate. He was pulp, and had to be taken to Amiens in a waggon.
Lefèbre and Durand deplored these happenings. They turned their eyes towards Louis Blanc’s buvette, and saw in it a storm-centre, a Pandora’s box, a pest-house.