ern. As he
proceeded to gain its shade, he heard extraordinary sounds of turbulence
from the front of the tavern, the yelling of men, the baying of hounds,
oaths and laughter, and, listening as he crossed the intervening space,
he fell into a ditch inadvertently, almost at the edge of the timber.

"Hallo!" cried Jimmy, lying quite still to draw his breath, since the
ditch was now perfectly dry, "this ditch seems to me to pint right for
that tavern."

He therefore crawled along its dry bed till it crossed under a road by a
wooden culvert or little bridge of a few planks.

The noise at the tavern was now like a fight, and, as Phoebus
continued to crawl forward, he heard twenty voices, crying,

"Gouge him, Owen Daw!" "Hit him agin, Cyrus James!" "Chaw him right up!"
"Give' em room, boys!"

Having crawled to what he judged the nearest point of concealed
approach, Phoebus lost the moment to take a single glance only, and,
drawing his old slouched hat down on his face to hide the bandaging, he
muttered, "Now's jess my time," and crept up to the back of the crowd,
which was all facing inwards in a circle, and did not perceive him.

A fully grown man, as it seemed, was having a fight with a boy hardly
fifteen years old; but the boy was the more reckless and courageous of
the two, while the man, with three times the boy's strength, lacked the
stomach or confidence to avail himself of it; and, having had the boy
down, was now being turned by the latter, amid shouts of "Three to two
on Owen Daw!" "Bite his nose off, Owen Daw!" "Five to two that Cyrus
James gits gouged by Owen Daw!"

The boy with a Celtic face and supple body was full of zeal to merit
favor and inflict injury, and, as the circle of vagrants and outlaws of
all ages reeled and swayed to and fro, Phoebus, unobserved by anybody,
put his head down among the rest and searched the faces for those of
Levin Dennis or Joe Johnson.

Neither was there, and the only face which arrested his attention was a
woman's, standing in the door of the enclosed space at the end of the
porch, at right angles to the central door of the tavern, and just
beside it. The whole building was without paint, and weather-stained,
but the room on the porch was manifestly newer, as if it had been an
afterthought, and its two windows revealed some of the crude appendages
of a liquor bar, as a fire somewhere within flashed up and lighted it.

By this fire the woman's face was also revealed, an