Page:Ralph Connor - The man from Glengarry.djvu/305

   fault, but it looks rather serious. Get back, you brute!" So saying, he caught a burly Frenchman under the chin with a straight left-hander and hurled him back upon the crowd.

"Ah, rather pretty," said the lieutenant, mildly. "It is not often you can just catch them that way." They were still a few yards from the shop door, but every step of their advance had to be fought.

"I very much fear we can't make it," said the lieutenant, quietly to Harry. "We had better back up against the wall here and fight it out."

But as he spoke they heard a sound of shouting down the street a little way, which the Ottawa leader at once recognized, and raising his voice he cried: "Hottawa! Hottawa! Hottawa à moi!"

Swiftly, fiercely, came the band of men, some twenty of them, cleaving their way through the crowd like a wedge. At their head, and taller than the others, fought two men, whose arms worked with the systematic precision of piston-rods, and before whom men fell on either hand as if struck with sledge-hammers.

"Hottawa à moi!" cried the Ottawa champion again, and the relieving party faced in his direction.

"I say," said the lieutenant, "that first man is uncommonly like your Glengarry friend."

"What, Ranald?" cried Harry. "Then we are all right. I swear it is," he said, after a few moments, and then, remembering the story of the great fight on the Nation, which he had heard from Hughie and