He Gingerly Touched The Shoulders Next Him With The
Tips Of His Fingers, And Now And Then Lifted Himself On The Tips Of His
Toes To Look If The Fight Had Stopped Of Itself Or Not.
At last the fat, elderly man, whom his friends - and all the throng
except that one wicked youth seemed
His friends - were caressing in
untimely embraces and coaxing in tones of tender entreaty, burst from
them, and, aiming at the head of his enemy, flung his club, to the
imminent peril of all the bystanders, and missed him. Then he frankly
put himself in the hands of his friends, who lifted him into a cab,
where one of them mounted with him and stayed him on the seat, while the
cabman drove rapidly away. The wicked youth had vanished in unknown
space; but the cara-biniere, attended by a group of admirers, marched
boldly up the middle of the street, and the crowd, with whatever
reluctance, persuaded itself to disperse, though the cabmen, to the
number of ten or twenty, continued to drive around in concentric circles
and irregular ellipses. In five minutes not an eye-witness of the fray
remained, such being the fear of the law, not so much in those who break
it as in those who see it broken, and who dread incurring the vengeance
of the culprit, if he is acquitted, or of his family if he is convicted
on their testimony. The quarrel had gone on a full quarter of an hour,
but the concierge of the hotel in front of which it had raged professed
to have known nothing of it, having, he said, been in-doors all the
time.
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