The Happy Warrior Part 47

Boss Maddox turned squarely on Pinsent. "Give it a rest till the morning, Foxy. You boys can't fight in this darkness--not you two."

Pinsent laughed: "I'm not going to fight him. I'm going to thrash him."

"Let me go, j.a.phra! Boss, let's have hands off! It's our show--no one else's."

Boss Maddox went back to his first contention. "This can't end here, Stingo," and j.a.phra answered him: "Nay, there's blood to be let, Boss.

We can't stop it--nor have call to." He released Percival while he spoke, but kept a hand on him, and motioned Stingo's arms away. He spoke in his slow habit, and with seeming reluctance, but there was a glimmer of relish in his voice. "They've to settle it, Boss."

"Will you fight him, Pinsent?" Boss Maddox asked.

Pinsent shook off the clutches upon him. He came forward two deliberate paces, and with great deliberation stretched himself, and with great deliberation spat upon the ground. Then fixed his eye on Percival. "If he likes to get out of it with a whipping," Pinsent said, "I'll learn him the manners he wants with your whip and let him off at that. If he's got the guts to stand up, I'll roast him till he lays down." He thrust forward his body towards Percival and said mockingly: "Which way? Which way, my pretty gentleman?"

Percival's face was a white lamp in the dusky night. "Give us room!"

he said.

Then Pinsent's voice lost its deliberate drawl and rasped out in a rasp that showed his breeding and showed his hate: "I want light to serve you up, my gentleman! Light and a pair of shoes! Christ! I've waited too long for this to spoil it. I've a pattern to put on that pretty face of yours--not in this dark. Where'll I fight him, Boss? Where?"

"Along the road in the morning."

Percival came up. "I'll not wait, Boss. You've heard him. I'll not wait."

Pinsent rasped: "Morning be withered! Now! Now, while I'm hot.

Where'll I fight him?"

Boss Maddox peered at his watch, then looked across the booths. "Nigh midnight--few left yonder. We'll be shut down in twenty minutes. At one o'clock."

And j.a.phra, a strange tremble in his voice: "In your tent, Boss. The boys will want to watch this. Room there, and good light."

Boss Maddox turned to Pinsent: "Good for you? The circus tent?"

"The place for it," Pinsent said. "Sharp at one. j.a.phra, you and me are ring men; come and settle a point."

"Come thou to me," j.a.phra answered him st.u.r.dily. "Thou and I!--I knew the ring, the knuckle ring, before thou sucked."

"Come to the tent," Boss Maddox interposed. "Best settle there."

j.a.phra took Percival a s.p.a.ce away. "Lay thee down," he said. His voice was frankly trembling now, and he pressed both Percival's hands in his. "Bide by my words; bide by them. Lay thee down till I return to thee. Forget thy spite against yonder fox. Ima!"

She was at his side, her hands clasped together, her face white and strained.

"Forget him his spite, and what comes, Ima. While he lies, with a rug and with his boots from his feet, bide thou there and read to him--Crusoe, eh? Stingo and I will make for thee, master. I am not long gone."

CHAPTER IV

FOXY PINSENT _V._ j.a.pHRA's GENTLEMAN

I

Visitors to the booths who had stayed late that night went home complaining of the abruptness with which the shows were closed and of the uncouth way in which showmen who had fawned and flattered for their patronage suddenly seemed no more occupied with them than to bustle them off the ground and set their faces townwards.

But visitors were not in the line of communication that flashed that amazing news around the camp:

"Heard it?"

"No!"

"Foxy Pinsent's to fight j.a.phra's Gentleman in the marquee!"

"What of it?"

"What of it, yer muddy thick? What of it? Not a show--private! Had a sc.r.a.p and to fight it out!"

"Eh? Fac'? No! When?"

"One o'clock. When the ground's clear." And, with a nod at the sightseers, "Get 'em out, mate! Get 'em out! Stars and stripes! What a knock-out!"

So, as the Fiery Cross among the Highland glens rushed with incredible swiftness, leaving in its wake a trail of mad commotion, the message flashed from mouth to mouth, booth to booth, van to van--received with utter incredulity, grasped with wildest excitement, relished with a zeal that caused every other thought and object to be abandoned, and resulted in a tide of feverish agitation to be at leisure for details and for the business that drove out naphtha flares and visitors alike as it swept across the ground. For there was more in the fight than the rare thrill of fight itself. It was accepted everywhere as the meeting by champion of the two factions; and the bickerings of many months, the final poison of that day's events, rushed a savage zest into the appet.i.tes that waited the encounter. Foxy Pinsent was Boss Maddox's party, coat off to put that Stingo crowd properly in its place; j.a.phra's Gentleman was the Stingo following, girt at last to collect a little on account for much outstanding debt. When, towards one o'clock, the surging crowd outside the marquee made a sudden movement forward and into the tent, it entered with rival cries, taunts, faction jeers--and separated, as a barrier had divided it, into two bodies that faced in mutual mock across the ring that had been formed.

They found preparations at the point of completion, done by half a dozen principles that Boss Maddox had called in, who stood conferring with him now on final arrangements--Stingo, with Ginger Cronk and s...o...b..ll White of j.a.phra's booth; Foxy Pinsent, hands in the pockets of his long yellow coat, with Buck Osborn and others of his Academy of Boxing and School of Arms--Pink Harman, Dingo Spain, Nut Harris. At a little distance j.a.phra stood with Percival. He had towels on his arm, a sponge in his hand, and as the crowd took up their places he turned and called a single word across the arena to the group within the ring.

"Gloves?" he called.

Pinsent answered him. Pinsent took his hands from the pockets of his coat and curved up two brown fists. "There's no gloves between us," he called back; and at his words the two groups of spectators drew as it were one long breath of relish--"Ah-h-h!" that hardened to murmurs of grim satisfaction, each man to his neighbour--"The raw 'uns!" "The knuckle!" "The knuckle!" "The raw 'uns!" and broke into individual bickerings, cries of derision, across the ring; and thence into a sudden wordless shouting, one party against the other--a blaring vent of old antagonism fermented by new cause that made the animals in the menagerie cages at the end of the arena leap from uneasy slumber to spring against their bars and join their chorus to a chorus brutish as their own.

II

To a renewed outburst of that clamour--the thing was on the tick of beginning--Ima raised the flap that covered the entrance to the marquee and stepped within. Simultaneously the shouting stilled with a sudden jerk that left an immense silence--Foxy Pinsent had stepped into the ring.

She stopped as if the sudden stillness struck her; and she took in the scene, her hands clasped against her breast.

The ring had been contrived within the inner circle that forms the working part of a circus arena. The canvas belt, some two feet high, that surrounded this circle during a performance, had been taken up as to the arc farthest from where she stood and brought forward to the great pole of the marquee. The wide half circle thus bounded was made the ring for the fight. Around the tent the lights above the seats had been extinguished; the great lamp of many burners that encircled the mast enclosed the ring in its arc of clear light. In the surrounding dimness, as Ima paused and watched, were the high tiers of red-draped, empty benches. Within the light's arc she saw the rival crowds on either hand; straight before her the gap that separated the two cl.u.s.ters and declared their enmity. At the centre front of each, against the canvas that bounded the ring, was a little caving-in of the throng where men in their shirt-sleeves knelt. Pinsent had just stepped out from this knot on the one side: in the other she saw Percival seated on her father's knee. A hundred men and more were behind Pinsent, behind Percival forty or fewer; there was significance in how each throng stood closely packed, refusing the accommodation that the ample s.p.a.ce between them offered--hatred was deep that preferred the discomfort of jostling and tiptoe standing to easier view at the price of mingling. Every face was beneath a peaked cap or dented bowler hat and above a scarfed neck; a pipe in most caused, as it were, a grey, shifting bank of smoke, cut flat by the darkness above the lamp's reflection, to be swaying above the caps as though they balanced it. Here and there were clumps of colour where women in blouses of red or white cl.u.s.tered together. Sweat, for the place was hot, glistened on this face and on that as if the grey, shifting bank above them exuded drops of water. There was something very sinister, very eerie, in the complete silence that for a moment held the scene; and Ima started to hear a sound of breathing and of restless movement.

She looked around. On either hand of where she stood the menagerie cages were banked. Dark or tawny forms were coiled or stretched there; in one cage was a big wolf, head down, nose at the bars, that watched the light as she watched it.

She went quickly forward to where she saw her father. Impatient way was made for her. j.a.phra was talking earnestly to Percival, and they scarcely seemed to notice her. She slipped down beside them, her knees against the canvas, and sat on her heels, her hands clasped at their full extension. She had said she would not come. She had found she must. While she had been with Percival waiting j.a.phra's return after the scene with Pinsent he had begun the contrition he had come to her to express. She suffered him nothing of it. "That is left where we laid it among the bracken," she told him. "Let it abide there. Look already what has come of it. If I had stayed with thee, this had not happened."

But her leaving him, and why she left, and his following her, and what came then, were of the train of the tricks and chances that shaped for him this day.

III

Boss Maddox spoke. "They're going to fight," he said, taking up a position against the mast and addressing the gathering in his dry, authoritative way--"They're going to fight, and you can count yourselves lucky to see it. If any one interferes--out he goes.

Everything's settled. If any one sees anything he don't think right or according to rule he can go outside and look for it--keep his mouth shut while he's going and go quick. Three minute rounds. One minute breathers. Ten count for the knock-out. Stingo 'll stand here with the watch. I'm referee. And I'm boss--bite on that. Come along, Foxy."

Pinsent, who had stepped over the canvas and strolled to the centre of the ring as Ima entered, was still in the long yellow coat, still with his hands in his pockets. He liked to have all those eyes upon him.

He liked to give pause and opportunity for the thought that this fine figure standing here had fought in cla.s.s rings and bore a reputation that gentlemen in shirt-fronts had paid gold to see at battle. He suffered usually a slight nervousness at the first moment of stepping into those cla.s.s rings: to-night and here he had an exultant feeling, and he carried it with a most effective swagger. He knew Percival could box. He had watched him spar in j.a.phra's booth. He knew, to express his own thoughts, there 'd be a little bit of mixin' up at the outset; but he knew, as only j.a.phra among them all also knew, that to his own skill that had put him in a good rank of his weight he added the experience, the craft, the morale of a score and more cla.s.s fights, and that such a quality is to be reckoned as a third arm against that poor thing--a "novice." "A novice, Boss!" he had said to Boss Maddox an hour before. "A novice--I lay there's more'n a few 'ud stop this fight if they knew what I was fighting. 'Strewth! I'd not do it myself but for what I've been saving up against the whelp!"