"
"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.
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