If I'm compilled to run yez in f'r assaultin' an officer ye'll get the cramps out av thim wrists breakin' stone, maybe.
Cr-r-r-amps, indade!" Cramps, indeed! Oh, Clement J.Cleggett, you liar! And yet, who does not lie in order to veil his inmost, sweetest thoughts from an unsympathetic world?
That was not an ordinary jab with an ordinary cane which Cleggett had directed towards the toolhouse door.

It was a thrust en carte; the thrust of a brilliant swordsman; the thrust of a master; a terrible thrust.

It was meant for as pernicious a bravo as ever infested the pages of romantic fiction.

Cleggett had been slaying these gentry a dozen times a day for years.

He had pinked four of them on the way across the bridge, before McCarthy, with his stomach and his realism, stopped the lunge intended for the fifth.