ldn't do anything else--which didn't soothe
his feelings any--and he went out mad enough to bite himself. The
drummer's guffaw followed him, and he thought he even caught a chuckle
from the elderly party with the magazine and spectacles.

Hawkeye was mad; and he was quite well aware, painfully well aware that
he had looked like a fool, which is about one of the meanest feelings
there is to feel; and, as he made his way forward through the train, he
grew madder still. That change was the change from his twenty-dollar
bill. He had not needed to be told that the lead quarter had come from
Toddles. The only question at all in doubt was whether or not Toddles
had put the counterfeit coin over on him knowingly and with malice
aforethought. Hawkeye, however, had an intuition deep down inside of
him that there wasn't any doubt even about that, and as he opened the
door of the baggage car his intuition was vindicated. There was a grin
on the faces of Nulty, MacNicoll and Bob Donkin that disappeared with
suspicious celerity at sight of him as he came through the door.

There was no hesitation then on Hawkeye's part. Toddles, equipped for
another excursion through the train with a stack of magazines and books
that almost hid him, received a sudden and vicious clout on the side of
the ear.

"You'd try your tricks on me, would you?" Hawkeye snarled. "Lead
quarters--eh?" Another clout. "I'll teach you, you blasted little
runt!"

And with the clouts, the stack of carefully balanced periodicals went
flying over the floor; and with the clouts, the nagging, and the
hectoring, and the bullying, that had rankled for close on two years in
Toddles' turbulent soul, rose in a sudden all-possessing sweep of fury.
Toddles was a fighter--with the heart of a fighter. And Toddles' cause
was just. He couldn't reach the conductor's face--so he went for
Hawkeye's legs. And the screams of rage from his high-pitched voice,
as he shot himself forward, sounded like a cageful of Australian
cockatoos on the rampage.

Toddles was small, pitifully small for his age; but he wasn't an infant
in arms--not for a minute. And in action Toddles was as near to a wild
cat as anything else that comes handy by way of illustration. Two legs
and one arm he twined and twisted around Hawkeye's legs; and the other
arm, with a hard and knotty fist on the end of it, caught the conductor
a wicked jab in the region of the bottom button of the vest. The brass