friend.
It was wholly disastrous to Beckett-Smythe. It caught him fairly on the nose, and, as the blow was in accord with the correct theory of dynamics as applied to forces in motion, it knocked him silly. His head flew up, his knees bent, and he dropped to the ground with a horrible feeling that the sky had fallen and that stars were sparkling among the rough paving-stones.
“That’s a finisher. He’s whopped!” exulted Jim Bates.
“No, he’s not. It was a chance blow,” cried Ernest, who was strongly inclined to challenge the victor on his own account. “Get up, Frank. Have another go at him!”
But Frank, who could neither see nor hear distinctly, was too groggy to rise, and the village girls drew together in an alarmed group. Such violent treatment of the squire’s son savored of sacrilege. They were sure that Martin would receive some condign punishment by the law for pummeling a superior being so unmercifully.
Angèle, somewhat frightened herself, tried to console her discomfited champion.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “It was all my fault.”
“Oh, go away!” he protested. “Ernest, where’s there a pump?”
Assisted by his brother, he struggled to his feet. His nose was bleeding freely and his face was ghastly in the moonlight. But he was a spirited youngster. He held out a hand to Martin.
“I’ve had enough just now,” he said, with an attempt at a smile. “Some other day, when my eye is all right, I’d like to——”
A woman’s scream of terror, a man’s cry of agony, startled the silent night and nearly scared the children out of their wits.
Someone came running up the garden path. It was Kitty Thwaites. She swayed unsteadily as she ran; her arms were lifted in frantic supplication.
“Oh, Betsy, Betsy, you’ve killed him!” she wailed. “Murder! Murder! Come, someone! For God’s sake, come!”
She stumbled and fell, shrieking frenziedly for help. Another woman—a woman whose extended right hand clutched a long, thin knife such as is used to carve game—appeared from the gloom of the orchard. Her wan face was raised to the sky, and a baleful light shone in her eyes.
“Ay, I’ll swing for him,” she cried in a voice shrill with hysteria. “May the Lord deal wi’ him as he dealt wi’ me! And my own sister, too! Out on ye, ye strumpet! ’Twould sarve ye right if I stuck ye wi’ t’ same knife.”
With a clatter of ironshod boots, most of the frightened children stampeded out of the stable yard. Martin, to whom Angèle clung in speechless fear, and the two Beckett-Smythes alone were left.
The din of steam organ and drums, the ceaseless turmoil of the fair, the constant fusillade at the shooting gallery, and the bawling of men in charge of the various sideshows, had kept the women’s shrieks from other ears thus far. But Kitty Thwaites, though almost shocked out of her senses, gained strength from the imminence of peril. Springing up from the path just in time to avoid the vengeful oncoming of her sister, she staggered toward the hotel and created instant alarm by her cries of “Murder! Help! George Pickering has been stabbed!”
A crowd of men poured out from bar and smoking-room. One, who took thought, rushed through the front door and snatched a naphtha lamp from a stall. Meanwhile, the three boys and the girl on the other side of the hedge, seeing and hearing everything, but unseen and unheard themselves, took counsel in some sort.
“I say,” Ernest Beckett-Smythe urged his brother, “let’s get out of this. Father will thrash us to death if we’re mixed up in this business.”
The advice was good. Frank forgot his dizziness for the moment, and the two raced to secure their bicycles from a stall-holder’s care. They rode away to the Hall unnoticed.
Martin remained curiously quiet. All the excitement had left him. If Elmsdale were rent by an earthquake just then, he would have watched the toppling houses with equanimity.
“I suppose you don’t wish to stop here now?” he said to Angèle.
The girl was sobbing bitterly. Her small body shook as though each gulp were a racking cough. She could not answer. He placed his arm around her and led her to the gate. While they were crossing the yard the people from the hotel crowded into the garden. The man with the lamp had reached the back of the house across the bowling green, and a stalwart farmer had caught Betsy Thwaites by the wrist. The blood-stained knife fell from her fingers. She moaned helplessly in disjointed phrases.
“It’s all overed now. God help me! Why was I born?”
Already a crowd was surging into the hotel through the front door. Martin guided his trembling companion to the right; in a few strides they were clear of the fair, only to run into Mrs. Saumarez’s German chauffeur.
He was not in uniform; in a well-fitting blue serge suit and straw hat, he looked more like a young officer in mufti than a mechanic. He was the first to recognize Angèle, and was so frankly astonished that he bowed to her without lifting his hat.
“You, mees?” he cried, seemingly at a loss for other words.
Angèle recovered her wits at once. She said something which Martin could not understand, though he was sure it was not in French, as the girl’s frequent use of that language was familiarizing his ears with its sounds. As a matter of fact, she spoke German, telling the chauffeur to mind his own business, and she would mind hers; but if any talking were done her tongue might wag more than his.
At any rate, the man did then raise his hat politely and walk on. The remainder of the road between Elmsdale and The Elms was deserted. Martin hardly realized the pace at which he was literally dragging his companion homeward until she protested.
“Martin, you’re hurting my arm! What’s the hurry? … Did she really kill him?”
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