shout, and I saw that there was going to be another fight at Casa
Grande--and I promptly decided to be in it. So off went my apron and
out I went.

It was funny. For, oddly enough, the effect of my entrance on the scene
was like that on a noisy class-room at the teacher's return. The tumult
stopped, rather sheepishly, and that earful of men instinctively slipped
on their armor plate of over-obsequious sex gallantry. They knew I
wasn't a low-brow. I went right up to them, though something about their
funereal discomfiture made me smile. So Dinky-Dunk, mad as a wet hen
though he was, had to introduce every man-jack of them to me! One was a
member of Parliament, and another belonged to some kind of railway
committee, and another was a road construction official, and another was
a mere capitalist who owned two or three newspapers. The man Dinky-Dunk
had been calling a liar was a civil engineer, although it seemed to me
that he had been acting decidedly uncivil. They ventured a platitude
about the beautiful Indian summer weather and labored out a ponderous
joke or two about such a bad-tempered man having such a good-looking
wife--for which I despised them all. But I could see that even if my
intrusion had put the soft pedal on their talk it had also left
everything uncomfortably tentative and non-committal. For some reason or
other this was a man's fight, one which had to be settled in a man's
way. So I decided to retire with outward dignity even if with inward
embarrassment. But I resented their uncouth commercial gallantry almost
as much as I abominated their trying to bully my True Love. And I gave
them one Parthian shot as I turned away.

"The last prize-fight I saw was in a sort of _souteneur's_ cabaret in
the Avenue des Tilleuls," I sweetly explained to them. "But that was
nearly three years ago. So if there is going to be a bout in my back
yard, I trust you gentlemen will be so good as to call me!"

And smiling up into their somewhat puzzled faces, I turned on my heel
and went into the house. One of the men laughed loud and deep, at this
speech of mine, and a couple of the others seemed to sit puzzling over
it. Yet two minutes after I was inside the shack that most uncivil civil
engineer and Dinky-Dunk were at it again. Their language was more than I
should care to repeat. The end of it was, however, that the six dusty
pallbearers all stepped stiffly down out of their car and Dinky-Dunk
shouted for Olie and Terry. A