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"I hadn't pluck enough to sit still and be shot, Mas'r Harry, for you know what a cur I always was; and I thought it a pity to sink the canoe in case you, if you were alive, or Mas'r Landell, might come back to look for it. So I made up my mind to the last, being bristly, and, with my monkey up, I dashed at him. "Bang!
He left a home where the certainty of being thwarted made him chary in expressing his wishes; where no tones of love ever fell on his ear, save those addressed to others; where his presence or absence was a matter of utter indifference; and when he entered Ty Glas, all, down to the little cur which, with clamorous barkings, claimed a part of his attention, seemed to rejoice.
The question came with a deadly softness. "I don't have to believe. I have seen." "Then," Stuart's words ripped themselves out like the tearing of cloth, "send your damned jackals outside, unless you want them to see their master treated as such a cur deserves."
As you may have seen two dogs that think to fight, walking slowly round and round each other, neither cur wishing to begin the combat, so those two stout yeomen moved slowly around, each watching for a chance to take the other unaware, and so get in the first blow.
He made no move to grasp the weapon. "I ain't fightin'," he said with trembling lips. Calumet reversed the gun and stepped back, laughing harshly, without mirth. "Of course you ain't fightin'," he said. "That's the reason it's goin' to be hard for me to kill you. I'd feel like a cur if I was to perforate you now you or your scarecrow dad.
Let them tear my heart out; but let them respect my father . . ." Some one outside called me in a violent voice. "Where is the coward? Where is that wretched boy?" shouted my Uncle Laurence. Then he shook the door; but I had fastened it so securely that it resisted all his furious blows. "That miserable cur is amusing himself by making love while our throats are being cut!
"Oh, Natalie!" he gabbled whiningly; "don't listen to him. He's a low cur! But he can't make trouble between you and me! Send him away! Natalie, I seem to have acted badly; but I can explain everything! Circumstances were all against me! In my heart I've never swerved from you! I dream of you every night in my lonesomeness! Wherever I look I see your face before my eyes!"
There would be a libel suit to-morrow and such an apology as this editorial cur had never dreamed he had it in him to write. He heard men talk of it in the subway and laugh, and saw them turn wondering eyes to meet his glare. He made short his trip home, anxious to enlist under his father's standard, thrilled with the thought of gripping his father's hand.
Once that decision was taken his imagination became riotous with things he might say, attitudes he might strike, and a multitude of vague fine dreams about her. He would say this, he would say that, his mind would do nothing but circle round this wonderful pose of lover. What a cur he had been to hide from her so long! What could he have been thinking about?
Father, do you know that when I think of a cur like that, I believe I could rend him with my own hands?" Anthony Dexter got to his feet unsteadily. The mists about him cleared and the veiled figure whisked suddenly out of his sight. He went up to Ralph as he might walk to the scaffold, but his head was held high. All the anguish of his soul crystallised itself into one passionate word: "Strike!"
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