Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/76

 on the river, lined quietly up at the fence, and took in the mourning group with the silence of unspeakable contempt.

Lonely, looking up and finding himself discovered in the midst of an eloquent funereal prayer, flushed hot and cold with a sudden inward rage—a rage more at himself than at his scoffing enemies.

"Makin' mud-pies?" mildly asked Redney McWilliams. There was something maddening in the soft and oily insolence of such a question. Lonely got up from his funeral hands-and-knees position.

"Why, he ain't got curls like the other two!" said one of the tormentors, in mock wonder.

Lonely walked slowly toward the fence, his face white, his jaws set, bristling like an angry terrier.

"I can lick you, you saphead!" he cried shrilly, as he shook his fist in the face of Piggie Brennan, the heaviest of the leering band. "I can lick you, d' you hear! I can lick any blamed one o' you."

A chorus of youthful laughter went up at this ineffectual and frenzied sally.