beside
himself. For Hugh had wrenched the staff from him and was holding the
hand that gripped the stiletto, while the lad, with streaming tears,
plunged, whined and gnashed at the backwoodsman.

"Let me go!" he begged. "I see their game! Let me kill their insulter of
ladies!"

The game was not hard to see. At a better moment than this blunderer had
chosen, some one was to provoke the actor to an assault which the twins
would make their pretext for a combined attack on that political
"suspect" and common pest, using the canes as canes until Hugh should be
drawn into the fray, when the canes would become swords, dirks, the
actor a secondary consideration, and the game--interesting. Hugh saw it
but saw it with even less sense of peril than Ramsey, who stood her
ground nervously cling-ing to her chaperon, yet flashing and tinkling
with a mirth as of some reckless sport; a mirth mildly reflected by her
companion and which, for Hugh, suddenly shed a ludicrous light on every
one: on himself and Basile; on the pallid Lucian as he peevishly,
vainly, ordered Ramsey off the scene; on Julian as he posed in a
tragical disdain more theatrical than the actor's--who also saw the
game; on the captain's dumfounded young folk; on the senator, the
general, and the Californian, standing agaze, and on the two men with
them, whose extra--eagle-eyed, stallion-eyed--solicitude told him they
were the lenders of the canes. All at once, still holding the anguished
Basile, he saw, and observed that the actor saw, the heaped-up nonsense
of the affair. Ramsey's mood leaped to both of them like a flame, and
they laughed together while Hugh exhorted the exhorter: "Go below! For
your life, go!"

The man cast a pleading look on the twins, but when Lucian granted him
only a withering smile, and Julian with his cane in his folded arms said
majestically, "Go, you hopeless ass," he went--with haste.

Out of the group by the bell John Courteney, apparently as unmoved as if
all this were but common routine, answered Watson's silent look with his
own while the pilot, taking his ear from a speaking-tube, grasped the
bell-rope.

"Wood?" asked the captain.

XXXVIII

THE CANE AGAIN

"Partly, sir."

All marked the qualifying word though at the same time all witnessed the
cross-fire of challenge and retort that flashed between the three
brothers. Basile had dropped his weapon and ceased to struggle, yet
still showed a mental torture, the same h