At last Freckles sprang up and backed away.  “Time!” he yelled as a fury.  “Be getting up, Mr. Wessner, and don’t be afraid of hurting me.  I’ll let you throw in an extra hand and lick you to me complate satisfaction all the same.  Did you hear me call the limit?  Will you get up and be facing me?”

As Wessner struggled to his feet, he resembled a battlefield, for his clothing was in ribbons and his face and hands streaming blood.

“I—­I guess I got enough,” he mumbled.

“Oh, you do?” roared Freckles.  “Well this ain’t your say.  You come on to me ground, lying about me Boss and intimatin’ I’d stale from his very pockets.  Now will you be standing up and taking your medicine like a man, or getting it poured down the throat of you like a baby?  I ain’t got enough!  This is only just the beginning with me.  Be looking out there!”

He sprang against Wessner and sent him rolling.  He attacked the unresisting figure and fought him until he lay limp and quiet and Freckles had no strength left to lift an arm.  Then he arose and stepped back, gasping for breath.  With his first lungful of air he shouted:  “Time!” But the figure of Wessner lay motionless.

Freckles watched him with regardful eye and saw at last that he was completely exhausted.  He bent over him, and catching him by the back of the neck, jerked him to his knees.  Wessner lifted the face of a whipped cur, and fearing further punishment, burst into shivering sobs, while the tears washed tiny rivulets through the blood and muck.  Freckles stepped back, glaring at Wessner, but suddenly the scowl of anger and the ugly disfiguring red faded from the boy’s face.  He dabbed at a cut on his temple from which issued a tiny crimson stream, and jauntily shook back his hair.  His face took on the innocent look of a cherub, and his voice rivaled that of a brooding dove, but into his eyes crept a look of diabolical mischief.

He glanced vaguely around him until he saw his club, seized and twirled it as a drum major, stuck it upright in the muck, and marched on tiptoe to Wessner, mechanically, as a puppet worked by a string.  Bending over, Freckles reached an arm around Wessner’s waist and helped him to his feet.

“Careful, now” he cautioned, “be careful, Freddy; there’s danger of you hurting me.”

Drawing a handkerchief from a back pocket, Freckles tenderly wiped Wessner’s eyes and nose.

“Come, Freddy, me child,” he admonished Wessner, “it’s time little boys were going home.  I’ve me work to do, and can’t be entertaining you any more today.  Come back tomorrow, if you ain’t through yet, and we’ll repate the perfarmance.  Don’t be staring at me so wild like!  I would eat you, but I can’t afford it.  Me earnings, being honest, come slow, and I’ve no money to be squanderin’ on the pailful of Dyspeptic’s Delight it would be to taking to work you out of my innards!”

Again an awful wrenching seized McLean.  Freckles stepped back as Wessner, tottering and reeling, as a thoroughly drunken man, came toward the path, appearing indeed as if wildcats had attacked him.