Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/161

 "Does kickin' go?" Piggie breathlessly demanded of his following, as he guarded and wheeled about after the still gyrating Lonely.

"Nope," said Redney McWilliams for the crowd, seeing that the New Boy was barefooted. One day earlier in his career, and Lonely would never have been treated with this untoward consideration. But a boy who had been a part of the Circus, for even an hour, was something to take seriously.

Lonely realized that such a decision on so mooted a point was a favor to him,—and it was a feather in his cap of vanity.

"Let him kick, the saphead! I can lick him, kickin' and all!" he cried, magnificently, as he saw the heavy blows of Piggie fall short of his own alert little back-jerks.

Piggie's answer to this airy concession was a prompt and stinging kick on the shin-bone, for as a kicker the butcher's son was a finished artist. The sharp pain of this brought the New Boy to his senses. He gave over his bantam-cock antics, and closed hotly in on his adversary. Then the fight began in dead earnest.

But over this old and unlovely scene of two young savages pounding and tearing at one