Читать книгу While Rivers Run - Maurice Walsh - Страница 7

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The two men that came round the corner were not looking for anyone. They were evidently concentrated on the same mood, and that an unpleasant one. The hidden angler, though the twilight was deepening instantly, noted that they were young men by a certain litheness of carriage and set of head. One was of middle height and broad, the other a little taller and a good deal slimmer. They walked as far apart as the gravel margin permitted, and did not once look at each other. The slim man carried his hands in his pockets, and the broad one occasionally gestured with his left arm. Both were in flannels and bare-headed. Whatever quarrel—sudden it must have been—had lifted between them came to its crisis within ten yards of the concealed fisherman. The two halted and faced each other, the slim man with his back to the alders.

“A meddling young puppy—that’s what you are, MacIan!” The heavily built man was the speaker.

“Keep the lid on it, Don.” MacIan’s retort was more provoking than pacifying.

“If I do boil over,” warned the man addressed as Don, “you’ll find how hot I am.”

Young MacIan was silent for a moment, and then spoke in a reasoned sort of chagrin. “Oh, hell! No use you being a dog in the manger.”

“I am not. Miss Carr is marrying me.”

“Has she told you so?”

Apparently she had not, for the reply was forcible.

“What the devil is that to you?”

“Only this,” said MacIan, and his tone was now firm and quiet: “Until Norrey Carr accepts you, I am going to admire her as much as I like, and tell her so.”

“I have warned you.”

“Shucks! you and your dam’ warning!” exclaimed the other with sudden exasperation.

“I have warned you.”

“Oh, go to blazes, Webster!”

And there it happened. Two grown men—but young—found the domain of language too limited, and thrust over the boundary into action. Webster—Don Webster in full—took a stride forward, his hands clenched at his sides. “You will drive me to it,” he growled, and he gestured with his right fist. It was a gesture more admonitory than pugnacious, for it is very probable that, at the back of his mind, he did not anticipate an undignified bout of fisticuffs. If so, the other surprised him.

MacIan had promptly taken up an attitude that showed he was a useful man of his hands. And a useful man of his hands, seeing a fist half-launched, does one of two things: counters if he has time, and side-slips if he has not. Time in plenty there was here, and so a right-hand snapped into Webster’s face, drawing red from a lower lip and flooding a brain with the same colour. There was no mistaking the whole-heartedness of Don Webster’s next move. He launched himself, hands clutching, on the lighter man, who again tried the proper move—a side-step out of distance. But side-stepping on rounded stones is precarious, and was here disastrous. A stone rolled, a foot slipped, hands went off guard, head came forward, and a round-arm, wholly unscientific, but thoroughly adequate wallop got home above MacIan’s left ear, and after a complicated, head-bumping tumble, he found himself sitting on the stones aprop on his hands, and there was on his face the half-vacant, half-intense look of a small boy doing mental arithmetic. Don Webster towered over him.

“You are a d——d fool, Alistair MacIan,” he cried, and there was disgust as well as anger in his voice—“and so am I, but now you know where you get off”; and forthwith he swung away and stumped off round the curve of the shore—and so out of sight.

That should have concluded the episode fittingly enough. But a good boxer dislikes being knocked silly at any time, and feels particularly outraged when knocked silly by an unscientific haymaker. Knocked silly, but not knocked out! Not by a long shot! Alistair MacIan scrambled to his feet and thrust forward after the man that had put him down for a mere short count and wanted to call it a completed job of work. Ill-fate had not yet done with him. Unstable ground, unstable feet, unstable head hurled him forward, in one falling, battering-ram lurch, head-first against a big boulder of smoothed quartz. The thud, on the very top of his head, had an oddly sickening sound. He flattened out, lay very still, arms abroad, and face to the cold stones.

“By Hepplewhite!” exclaimed the astonished fisherman, and came out of his hiding.