Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/309

 "I don't care what it is. I know what there's been, what you've charged for it, and what you've been paid already." Jan thought it time for a bit of bluff. "This is all you'll get; but you don't touch a penny of it till you've signed the receipt."

"Don't I!" snarled Mulberry. Without lowering his flaming eyes, or giving Jan time to lower his, he slapped the back of the upturned hand and sent the money flying in all directions. Neither looked where it fell. Mulberry was ready for a blow. Jan never moved an eye, scarcely a muscle. And over them rose and fell such sylvan music as had been rising and falling all the time; only now their silence brought it home.

"You'll simply have to pick it all up again," said Jan quietly. "But if you don't sign this, Mulberry, I'm going to break every bone in your beastly body with your own infernal stick."

He finished as quietly as he had begun; it must have been his face that said still more, or his long and lissom body, or his cricketer's wrists. Whatever the medium, the message was understood, and twitching hands held out in token of submission. Jan put the pen in one, the prepared receipt in the other, and Mulberry turned a back bowed with defeat. Close behind him grew a stunted old oak, forked like a catapult, with ivy winding up the twin stems. Down sat Mulberry in the fork, and with such careless precision that Jan might have seen it was a favourite seat, and the whole little open space, with its rustling carpet and its whispering roof, its acorns and its cigar ends, a tried old haunt of others besides Mulberry. But Jan kept so close an eye on his man that the receipt was being signed, on one corduroy knee, before he looked up to see the broad bust of a third party enclosed in the same oak frame.