A Knight Out 9
A dangerous look came into the eyes of the insane
earl. He took a pace backwards and raised his stick.
But Fordham, old campaigner that he was, had antici-
pated the gesture. He had been to the Western States
in his youth ; and what he did not know about scrapping
was not worth being known. In particular, he was
very much alive to the fact that an unarmed man sitting
behind a fixed table has no chance against a man with
a stick in the open. .
He slipped out like a cat. Before Bumble could
bring down his cane, the old man had dived under his
guard and taken the lunatic by the throat.
There was no sort of a fight. The veteran shook
his opponent like a bull-dog; and, shifting his grip,
flung him to the ground with one tremendous throw.
In less than two seconds the affair was over. Fordham
was kneeling on the chest of the defeated bully, who
whined and gasped and cried for mercy, and told
the man twenty years his senior, whom he had de-
liberately provoked into the fight, that he mustn't
hurt him because they were such old friends!
The behaviour of a crowd in affairs of this kind always
seems to me very singular. Every one, or nearly every
one, seems to start to interfere; and nobody actually
does so.
But this matter threatened to prove more serious.
The old man had really lost his temper. It was odds
that he would choke the life out of the cur under his knee.
I had just enough presence of mind to make way
for the head waiter, a jolly, burly Frenchman, who
came pushing into the circle. I even lent him a hand
to pull Fordham off the prostrate form of his antagonist.
A touch was enough. The old man recovered his
temper in a second, and calmly went back to his table
with no more sign of excitement than shouting “ sixty
to forty, sixty to forty.”
“I’m on,” cried the voice of a man who had just
come in at the end of the café and missed the scene by
a minute. ‘‘ But what’s the horse?”