Page:Vance--Terence O'Rourke.djvu/32

 Quivering with rage, the Frenchman began to draw off his gloves. O'Rourke divined what he purposed. He paled slightly, and his mouth became a hard, straight line as he warned the aggressor.

"Be careful, ye whelp! If ye strike me, I'll—"

The gloves were flicked smartly across his lips, instantly demolishing whatever barriers of self-restraint he had for a check upon his temper. He swore, his eyes blazing, and his arm shot out. The Frenchman received the full impact of the blow upon his cheek, and—subsided.

Standing over the prostrate body, O'Rourke glanced up and down the street; it seemed very still, quite dark, almost deserted. Only upon a distant corner he made out the figure of a man leaning negligently against a lamp-post; he might prove to be a gendarme, but, so far, apparently, his attention had not been attracted to the affair.

O'Rourke's primal impulse was to pass on, and leave his adversary to his fate; but the retaliating blow had cooled his anger by several degrees. On second thought, the Irishman decided to play the good Samaritan—which was egregious folly. His man was sitting up, by then, rubbing ruefully his cheek; O'Rourke gave him a generous hand and assisted him to his feet.

"I trust," he said, "that ye are not severely injured—"

"Canaille!" rasped the Frenchman, sullenly, dusting his coat; and he drove home the epithet with a venomous threat.

O'Rourke laughed at him.

"Aha," he cried, "then ye've not had enough? Do I understand that ye want another dose of the same?"

Silently the man picked up his hat from the gutter, knocked it into shape, and rubbed it against his sleeve in fatuous effort to restore some of its pristine brilliancy.