passer?" echoed 'Bias, squaring up. "What about your damned
trespassing cattle?"

Mrs Bosenna stepped past Cai and flung herself between the combatants.
Strange to say she ignored 'Bias, and faced the enemy, to plead with
him.

"Mr Middlecoat, how can you be so foolish? He's as good as a
prize-fighter!"

The young farmer stared and lowered his guard slowly.

"Your servant, ma'am! . . . A prize-fighter? Why couldn't he have told
me so, at first?"

CHAPTER XIII.

FAIR CHALLENGE.

Again the two friends traversed back the valley road in silence: but
this time they made no attempt to deceive themselves or to deceive one
another by charging their constraint upon the atmosphere or the scenery.
Each was aware that their friendship had a crisis to be overcome; each
sincerely pitied the other, with some twinge of compunction for his own
good fortune; each longed to make a clean breast--"a straight quarrel is
soonest mended," says the proverb,--and each, as they kept step on the
macadam, came separately to the same decision, that the occasion must be
taken that very evening, when pipes were lit after supper. The reader
will note that even yet, on the very verge of the crisis, Cai and 'Bias
owned:

"Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one."

Now, in accordance with routine, supper should have been served that
evening at 'Bias's table. But Cai--on his way upstairs to titivate--
perceived that the lamp was lit and the cloth spread in his own parlour;
and, as he noted this with a vague surprise, encountered Mrs Bowldler.

"Which, if it is agreeable, we are at home to Captain Hunken this
evening," Mrs Bowldler began, in a panting hurry, and continued with a
catch of the breath, "Which if you see it in a different light, I must
request of you, sir, to allow Palmerston to carry down my box, and you
may search it if you wish."

"Oh! Conf--" began Cai in his turn, and checked himself. "I beg your
pardon, ma'am; but it really does seem as if I never reach home nowadays
without you meet me at the foot of the stairs, givin' notice.
What's wrong this time?"

"If you drive me to it, sir," said Mrs Bowldler in an aggrieved tone,
"it's Captain Hunken's parrot."

"Captain Hunken's parrot?" echoed Cai, genuinely surprised; for, in his
experience, this bird was remarkable, if at all, for an obese lethargy.
It could talk, to be sure. Now and again it would ejaculate
"Scratch Polly,"