Wickersham smiled. Once more his bearing
was the very essence of perfect poise and self-control.
"If you--if you are afraid----" he inferred. "If you----"
Allison's laugh was big and booming, for all that the astonishment had
not yet left his eyes.
"Cold feet," he rumbled. "Cold feet! Me!" And suddenly his gust of
mirthless laughter made petty the other's insolence. "Wickersham, I've
broken better crooks than you'll ever be. A man has to have a big
heart to be a big crook and you--and you--well, sometimes I wonder
whether there wasn't some sort of an oversight in that line, when they
put you together."
He couldn't have explained why the thought came to him at that moment
any more than he understood his swiftly malicious impulse to use it;
but all in a flash there came back to him a recollection of that day
when he and Caleb had burst through the hedge to find the boy, Stephen
O'Mara, pummeling a bigger prostrate boy who shrieked under the earnest
thoroughness of that pummeling. Allison, too, rose to his feet.
"I only wanted to give you a chance," he stated dryly. "I reckon I can
take care of myself. I always could. And you--well, you know as well
as I do what sort of a scrap that--that woods-rat can put up, or you
ought to. He gave you a sort of a demonstration, once, if I remember
correctly. I stick! I never was overly squeamish.
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