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But he was a youth of indomitable spirit, strong and agile as a wild cat; and returning blow for blow he succeeded in tearing himself from them, then after a running fight through the darkest part of the wood for a distance of two or three hundred yards they at length lost him or gave him up and went back to assist Harbutt and Moses against the other man.
Meanwhile the inmates were in a state of great excitement; the under-keepers feared that a force it would be dangerous to oppose had taken possession of the woods, while Harbutt raved and roared like a maddened wild beast in a cage, and put forth all his strength to pull the doors open. Finally he smashed a window and leaped out, gun in hand, and calling the others to follow rushed into the wood.
"When I said that," returned the other, with a grin, "I was just thinking what 'twould be he deserves to git." "And you'd agot your deserts, by God," cried the angry father, "if that boy of mine hadn't a-been left alone to fight ye!" Harbutt regarded him with a smile of gratified malice. "You can go home now," he said. "If you'd see your son you'll find'n in Salisbury jail.
"Oh, I was a lot o' things," replied Harbutt. "Wished I'd never left them to join this b y business, but it's the same ashore, owners all the time stuffin' themselves and gettin' rich, workers starvin'." Raft belonged to the old time labour world dating from Pelagon, he grumbled, but had no grudge against owners in general, it was only in drink that Pelagon rose in him.
Snoring and drugged with ozone a kick would only have made them curse and turn on the other side, and as he talked his voice made part of that procession of noises inseparable from the fo'c'sle of a ship under sail against a head sea. He had been holding forth on the food and general conditions of this ship compared with the food and conditions of his last, when Harbutt cut in.
On these occasions a saloon bar with its glitter and phantom show of mirth and prosperity sometimes called on him to dispense and destroy it, the passion to fight the crowd seized him, a passion that has its origin, perhaps, in sources other than alcohol. He was talking now to Harbutt, scarcely lowering his voice on account of the fellows in the bunks.
Of social distinction, beyond the division of afterguard from fo'c'sle, he seemed to possess little idea, save for a vague echo, caught from the man Harbutt, about the Rich People; and as to sex, beyond a queer instinctive delicacy and a tenderness due to her weakness and the memory of how he had found her, she might just as well have been a man, or a child like himself.
Harbutt knew a lot but he could not see how the chaps in plug hats kept other people down; the few he had seen had always seemed to him away and beyond his world, soft folk, and always busy about their own affairs and how were they to be made an end of? "Do you mean killing them?" he asked. "Oh, there's other ways than killin'," replied Harbutt. "It's not them, it's their money does the trick."
The brothers were left but refused to be taken, although Harbutt roared at them in his bull's voice that he would shoot them unless they surrendered. They made light of his threats and fought against the four, and eventually were separated. By and by the younger of the two was driven into a brambly thicket where his opponents imagined that it would be impossible for him to escape.
Harbutt was an atom of the new voice that is heard everywhere now, even in fo'c'sles. He had failed in everything on land and a'board ship he was a slacker. You cannot be a voice and an A.B. at the same time. "What was your last job ashore?" went on Raft with the persistence of a child, always wanting to know. "Cleanin' out pig sties," said Harbutt viciously. "Drove to it.
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