“Come to think of it,” suggested Ham casually, “I guess you’d better write a note before we go in—­it seems a kind of shame to treat Jimmy like that without givin’ him any warnin’.”  He set the bucket in the path and fumbled in his pocket for a scrap of paper.  “I’ll just help you out,” he volunteered graciously.  “Start with his name—­like this—­’James Marquess; Sir—.’”

Paul hesitated, and Ham took a step forward with a cool glint in his eyes before which the other quailed.  “I’ll write it, Ham,” he hastily whimpered.

“James Marquess; Sir—­” continued the laconic voice of the directing mind.  “If you think I am afraid of you, you have erred in judgment.  I don’t like you and I don’t care for your personal appearance.  If you so much as squint at me after school today I intend to change the general appearance of your face.  It won’t be handsome when I get through, but I guess it will be an improvement, at that.

“Respectfully,

“Paul Burton.”

The coerced writer groaned deeply as he scrawled the signature which pledged him so irretrievably to battle.  He felt that his autograph to such a missive was distinctly inappropriate, and invited sure calamity.  Ham, however, only nodded approval as he commanded, “When you take the bucket up, lay that on his desk and be sure he gets it.”

Yet as Paul plodded on, a piteous little shape of quaking terror, Ham let the glance of militant tenderness flash once more into his eyes, and his voice came in sympathetic timbre.

“Paul, I can’t always do your fightin’ for you.  If I could I wouldn’t make you do it—­but you’ve got to learn how to stand on your own legs.  It ain’t only the Marquess kid you’re fightin’.  You’ve got to lick the yeller streak out of yourself before it ruins you.”  He paused, then magnanimously added, “If you trim him down good and proper, I’ll get you a new violin string in place of the one you busted.”

It was a very unmilitary shape that huddled in its seat, watching his adversary read the ultimatum.  As for the heir of the house of Marquess, he allowed his freckled face for a moment to pucker in blank astonishment, then a smile of beatitude enveloped it.  It was such beatitude as might appear on the visage of a cat who has unexpectedly received a challenge to mortal combat from a mouse.

An hour of the afternoon session yet intervened between the present and the awful future and upon Paul Burton it rested with its incubus of dire suspense.  It was an hour which the Marquess kid employed congenially across the aisle.  Whenever the tired eyes of the teacher were not upon him he gave elaborate pantomimes wherein he felt the swelling biceps of his right arm, and made as if to spit belligerently upon his doubled fist.  Sometimes his left hand seemed struggling to restrain the deadly right, lest it leap forth untimely in its hunger for smiting.  These wordless pleasantries were in no wise lost on the shrinking Paul in whose slight body slept the spirit of the artist unfortified with martial iron of combat.