the fallen editor pick himself up, with a face of stupefied wonder, and
immediately start back toward the angry proof-reader.
Mr. Pat lowered redly on his threshhold. "G'awn now! Get away!"
Queed came to a halt a pace away and stood looking at him.
"G'awn, I tell ye! I don't want no more of your foolin'!"
The young man, arms hanging inoffensively by his side, stared at him
with a curious fixity.
These tactics proved strangely disconcerting to Mr. Pat, obsessed as he
was by a sudden sense of shame at having thumped so impotent an
adversary.
"Leave me be, Mr. Queed. I'm sorry I hit ye, and I niver would 'a' done
it--if ye hadn't--"
The man's voice died away. He became lost in a great wonder as to what
under heaven this little Four-eyes meant by standing there and staring
at him with that white and entirely unfrightened face.
Queed was, in fact, in the grip of a brand-new idea, an idea so sudden
and staggering that it overwhelmed him. He could not thrash Mr. Pat. He
could not thrash anybody. Anybody in the world that desired could put
gross insult upon his articles and go scot-free, the reason being that
the father of these articles was a physical incompetent.
All his life young Mr. Queed had attended to his own business, kept
quiet and avoided trouble. This was his first fight, because it was the
first time that anybody had publicly insulted his work. In his whirling
sunburst of indignation, he had somehow taken it for granted that he
could punch the head of a proof-reader in much the same way that he
punched the head off Smathers's arguments. Now he suddenly discovered
his mistake, and the discovery was going hard with him. Inside him there
was raging a demon of surprising violence of deportment; it urged him to
lay hold of some instrument of a rugged, murderous nature and
assassinate Mr. Pat. But higher up in him, in his head, there spoke the
stronger voice of his reason. While the demon screamed homicidally,
reason coldly reminded the young man that not to save his life could he
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