The Way of a Man | Page 8

wrist, and as he stumbled past, I turned and had his arm over my
shoulder. I admit I threw him rather cruelly hard, for I thought he
needed it. He was entirely quiet when we carried him into the room and
placed him on the leather lounge.
"By Jove!" I heard a voice at my elbow. "That was handsomely
done--handsomely done all around."
I turned to meet the outstretched hand of my new friend, Gordon Orme.
"Where did you learn the trick?" he asked.
"The trick of being a gentleman," I answered him slowly, my face red
with anger at Singleton's foolishness, "I never learned at all. But to toss
a poor drunken fool like that over one's head any boy might learn at
school."
"No," said my quasi-minister of the gospel, emphatically, "I differ with
you. Your time was perfect. You made him do the work, not yourself.
Tell me, are you a skilled wrestler?"

I was nettled now at all these things which were coming to puzzle and
perturb an honest fellow out for a morning ride.
"Yes," I answered him, "since you are anxious to know, I'll say I can
throw any man in Fairfax except one."
"And he?"
"My father. He's sixty, as I told you, but he can always beat me."
"There are two in Fairfax you cannot throw," said Orme, smiling.
My blood was up just enough to resent this challenge. There came to
me what old Dr. Hallowell at Alexandria calls the "gaudium
certaminis." In a moment I was little more than a full-blooded fighting
animal, and had forgotten all the influences of my Quaker home.
"Sir," I said to him hotly, "I propose taking you home with me. But
before I do that, and since you seem to wish it, I am going to lay you on
your back here in the road. Frankly, there are some things about you I
do not like, and if that will remedy your conceit, I'm going to do it for
you--for any sort of wager you like."
"Money against your horse?" he inquired, stripping to his ruffled shirt
as he spoke. "A hundred guineas, five hundred?"
"Yes, for the horse," I said. "He's worth ten thousand. But if you've two
or three hundred to pay for my soiling the shoulders of your shirt, I'm
willing to let the odds stand so."
He smiled at me simply--I swear almost winningly, such was the
quality of the man.
"I like you," he said simply. "If all the men of this country resembled
you, all the world could not beat it."
I was stripped by this time myself, and so, without pausing to consider
the propriety on either side of our meeting in this sudden encounter in a
public street, we went at it as though we had made a rendezvous there

for that express purpose, with no more hesitation and no more fitness
than two game cocks which might fall fighting in a church in case they
met there.
Orme came to me with no hurry and no anxiety, light on his feet as a
skilled fencer. As he passed he struck for my shoulder, and his grip,
although it did not hold, was like the cutting of a hawk's talons. He
branded me red with his fingers wherever he touched me, although the
stroke of his hand was half tentative rather than aggressive. I went to
him with head low, and he caught me at the back of the neck with a
stroke like that of a smiting bar; but I flung him off, and so we stepped
about, hands extended, waiting for a hold. He grew eager, and allowed
me to catch him by the wrist. I drew him toward me, but he braced with
his free arm bent against my throat, and the more I pulled, the more I
choked. Then by sheer strength I drew his arm over my shoulder as I
had that of Harry Singleton. He glided into this as though it had been
his own purpose, and true as I speak I think he aided me in throwing
him over my head, for he went light as a feather, and fell on his feet
when I freed him. I was puzzled not a little, for the like of this I had not
seen in all my meetings with good men.
As we stepped about cautiously, seeking to engage again, his eye was
fixed on mine curiously, half contemplatively, but utterly without
concern or fear of any kind. I never saw an eye like his. It gave me not
fear, but horror! The more I encountered him, the more uncanny he
appeared. The lock of the arm at the back of the neck, those holds
known as the Nelson and the half-Nelson, and