Vienna realized it, too, for with a howl of protest her men came swarming into the square.

“Souse the hide off’m the red-bellied sons of Gehenna!” Hiram yelled, and the hosemen, obedient to the word, swept the hissing stream on the enemy.

Men who will face bullets will run from hornets.

Men who will charge cannon can be routed by water.

The men at the brakes of old Hecla pumped till the tub jigged on her trucks like a fantastic dancer.  To right, to left, in whooshing circles, or dwelling for an instant on some particularly obstreperous Vienna man, the great stream played.  Some were knocked flat, some fell and were rolled bodily out of the square by the stream, others ran wildly with their arms over their heads.  The air was full of leather hats, spinning as the water struck them.  Every now and then the hosemen elevated the nozzle and gave Colonel Gideon Ward his share.  A half-dozen times he nearly fell off his perch and flapped out like a rag on a bush.

“It certainly ain’t no place for ladies!” communed Hiram with himself, gazing abroad from his elevated position on Imogene’s neck.  “I thought it was once, but it ain’t.”

“Colonel Gideon Ward,” he shouted to the limp and dripping figure in the tree, “do you own up?”

The Colonel withdrew one arm to shake his fist at the speaker, and narrowly saved himself by instantly clutching again, for the crackling stream tore at him viciously.

“We’ll drownd ye where ye hang,” roared the foreman of the Ancients, “before we’ll let you or any other pirate rinky-dink us out of what belongs to us.”

Like some Hindu magician transplanted to Yankeedom he bestrode the neck of his elephant, and with his hand summoned the waving stream to do his will.  Now he directed its spitting force on the infuriated Colonel; now he put to flight some Vienna man who plucked up a little fleeting courage.

And at last Colonel Ward knuckled.  There was nothing else to do.

“I made a mistake,” he said, in a moment of respite from the stream.

“You spit on the paper and measured in twenty extry feet jest as Cap’n Aaron Sproul said you did,” insisted Hiram.  “Say that, and say it loud, or we’ll give old Hecly the wickin’ and blow you out of that tree.”

And after ineffectual oaths the Colonel said it—­said it twice, and the second time much the louder.

“Then,” bellowed the triumphant Hiram, “the record of old Hecly Number One still stands, and the championship banner travels back to Smyrna with us to-night, jest as it travelled down this mornin’.”

“Hain’t you goin’ to squirt?” asked some one posted safely behind a distant tree.

“If you’d been payin’ ’tention as you ought to be you’d have jest seen us squirtin’,” replied the foreman of the Ancients with quiet satire.  “And when we squirt, we squirt to win.”

Cap’n Aaron Sproul turned away from a rapt and lengthy survey of Colonel Ward in the tree.