bed
away. They followed each other feebly, stretching their long, lagging
throats languidly, opening their beaks and hanging out their dry, white
tongues, turning tail, then twisting about and fighting again, until
both lay stretched out on the pit bottom.

As the energy of the cocks subsided, the ardor of the men waxed
sensibly. They yelled excitedly, protested, reviled, swore, laughed,
jeered, and crowed.

At length, when the bantam fell and gave no signs of speedy
resurrection, the anger of Drayton could not be supported. He leaped
across the pit, his face red as his cock's comb, and shouting, "Damme,
what for did ye pick up my bird?" he planted a blow full on the
blacksmith's chest.

A fight of yet fiercer kind followed. Amid shouts, and in the thick of a
general scuffle, the blacksmith closed with his powerful adversary,
gripped him about the waist, twisted him on his loins, and brought him
to the ground with a crash. Then he stood over him with fierce eyes.

"I mak' no doubt you're not hankerin' for another of that sort!" he
puffed.

"John's given him the cross-buttock," said the miller.

"The master's lost all his wrustling," said Natt, blinking out of his
sleepy eyes.

"I mind the day when he could have put John down same as a bit boy,"
said the little postman.

Natt helped Drayton to his feet. He was quiet enough, now, but as black
in the face as a thunder-cloud.

"This comes of a gentleman mixing with them as is beneath him," he
muttered, and he mopped his perspiring forehead with a bandanna
handkerchief.

The miller snorted, the mason grunted, the little postman laughed in his
thin pipe.

Drayton's eyes flashed.

"I'm a gentleman, I am, if you want to know," he said, defiantly.

The blacksmith stood by, leisurely rolling down his shirt-sleeves.

"Ey, for fault of wise folk we call you so," he said, and laughed. "But
when I leet of a man, I's rather have him nor a hundred sec gentlemen as
you!"

"Thoo's reet for once, John!" shouted Dick o' the Syke, and there was
some general laughter.

"Gentleman! Ax the women-folk what they mak' of sec a gentleman,"
continued the blacksmith with contemptuous emphasis. "Him as larn't
folks to fill the public and empty the cupboard."

There was a murmur among the men as they twisted about.

"Ax them what they mak' of him 'at spent four days in Lunnon and came
back another man--ax the women-folk; they're maistly reet, I reckon."

Another uneasy movem