And you, friend Callow, who have blunted your palate by swallowing the Cayenne pepper of the penny-dreadfuls, you wish me to make this night exciting by a hand-to-hand contest between Ralph and a robber.  You would like it better if there were a trap-door.  There’s nothing so convenient as a trap-door, unless it be a subterranean passage.  And you’d like something of that sort just here.  It’s so pleasant to have one’s hair stand on end, you know, when one is safe from danger to one’s self.  But if you want each individual hair to bristle with such a “Struggle in the Dark,” you can buy trap-doors and subterranean passages dirt cheap at the next news-stand.  But it was, indeed, a real and terrible “Struggle in the Dark” that Ralph fought out at Pete Jones’s.

When he had vanquished his fears of personal violence by reminding himself that it would be folly for Jones to commit murder in his own house, the question of Bud and Hannah took the uppermost place in his thoughts.  And as the image of Hannah spelling against the master came up to him, as the memory of the walk, the talk, the box-elder tree, and all the rest took possession of him, it seemed to Ralph that his very life depended upon his securing her love.  He would shut his teeth like the jaws of a bulldog, and all Bud’s muscles should not prevail over his resolution and his stratagems.

It was easy to persuade himself that this was right.  Hannah ought not to throw herself away on Bud Means.  Men of some culture always play their conceit off against their consciences.  To a man of literary habits it usually seems to be a great boon that he confers on a woman when he gives her his love.  Reasoning thus, Ralph had fixed his resolution, and if the night had been shorter, or sleep possible, the color of his life might have been changed.

But some time along in the tedious hours came the memory of his childhood, the words of his mother, the old Bible stories, the aspiration after nobility of spirit, the solemn resolutions to be true to his conscience.  These angels of the memory came flocking back before the animal, the bull-doggedness, had “set,” as workers in plaster say.  He remembered the story of David and Nathan, and it seemed to him that he, with all his abilities and ambitions and prospects, was about to rob Bud of the one ewe-lamb, the only thing he had to rejoice in in his life.  In getting Hannah, he would make himself unworthy of Hannah.  And then there came to him a vision of the supreme value of a true character; how it was better than success, better than to be loved, better than heaven.  And how near he had been to missing it!  And how certain he was, when these thoughts should fade, to miss it!  He was as one fighting for a great prize who feels his strength failing and is sure of defeat.