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ONE:He turned. There was not a second to spare. The two long-haired fellows came nip and tuck. I see yet their long deer-hunters' rifles. But I remembered my pledge to this man's wife, and proudly found I had the nerve to hold the trigger still unpressed when at the apron of the bridge the rascals caught their first full sight of us as we sat humpshouldered, eye to eye, like one gray tomcat and one yellow one. They dragged their horses back upon their haunches. One leaped to the ground, the other aimed from the saddle; but the first shot that woke the echoes was neither theirs nor mine, but Sergeant Jim Langley's, though that, of course, I did not know. It came from a tree on our side of the water, some forty yards downstream. The man in the saddle fired wild, and as his horse wheeled and ran, the rider slowly toppled over backward out of saddle and stirrups and went slamming to the ground.

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ONE:We rose at dawn and rode eastward, he and I alone, some fourteen miles, to the Sessions's, where the dance had been two nights earlier. On entering the stable to put up our horses we suddenly looked at each other very straight, while Ferry's countenance confessed more pleasure than surprise, though a touch of care showed with it. "I did not know this," he said, "and I did not expect it."

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ONE:"There was another fortune-teller who did his work by writing on a plate. He had several sheets of paper folded up, and from these he asked his customer to select one. When the selection was made, he dissected the writing, and showed its meaning to be something so profound that the customer was bewildered and thought he had nothing but good-fortune coming to him. We tried to get these men to tell our fortunes, but they preferred to stick to their own countrymen, probably through fear that they would lose popularity if they showed themselves too friendly with the strangers.

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ONE:But the contents were another matter, and they both annoyed him excessively, and kindled in him a blaze of defiance. He would much have{244} liked to know who were these members for whom he was not good enough, and whose opposition Lord Inverbroom had been unable to mitigate. But as far as withdrawing his candidature went for fear of the result of the election, or acquainting Lord Inverbroom of the fact that as purchaser of the property he had the ex officio privilege of being a member, such craven notions never entered his head. If sufficient members to secure his rejection, objected to him, they should record their objections: he was not going to withdraw on the chance of their doing so. He had never yet abandoned a business proposition for fear of competition, and it seemed to him that to withdraw his name was somehow parallel to being frightened out of a deal. Judging from the purely business standpoint (and there was his mistake) he expected to find that a large quantity of this supposed opposition was bluff. Besides, before the election came on, it would be known who had given the new wing to the hospital, and pulled the committee out of a quagmire of rotten finance: it would be known too, that whether the County Club thought him a suitable occupant of the bow-window that looked on Alfred Street, his Sovereign thought him good enough to go into dinner before any of them except Lord Inverbroom. He was no snob himself, but he suspected that a good many other people were.

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