He slept upon his wrath, and in the morning early, at an hour when he knew there would be no loafers in the place, he went to an out-dated saddler’s shop, and asked the owner, a veteran of his father’s regiment, “Welks, do you happen to have a cowhide among your antiquities?”

“Regular old style?” Welks returned.  “Kind they make out of a cow’s hide and use on a man’s?”

“Something of that sort,” said Richard, with a slight smile.

The saddler said nothing more, but rummaged among the riff-raff on an upper shelf.  He got down with the tapering, translucent, wicked-looking thing in his hand.  “I reckon that’s what you’re after, squire.”

“Reckon it is, Welks,” said Richard, drawing it through his tubed left hand.  Then he buttoned it under his coat, and paid the quarter which Welks said had always been the price of a cowhide even since he could remember, and walked away towards the station.

“How’s the old colonel” Welks called after him, having forgotten to ask before.

“The colonel’s all right,” Richard called back, without looking round.

He walked up and down in front of the station.  A local train came in from Ballardsville at 8.15, and waited for the New York special, and then returned to Ballardsville.  Richard had bought a ticket for that station, and was going to take the train back, but among the passengers who descended from it when it drew in was one who saved him the trouble of going.

Bittridge, with his overcoat hanging on his arm, advanced towards him with the rest, and continued to advance, in a sort of fascination, after his neighbors, with the instinct that something was about to happen, parted on either side of Richard, and left the two men confronted.  Richard did not speak, but deliberately reached out his left hand, which he caught securely into Bittridge’s collar; then he began to beat him with the cowhide wherever he could strike his writhing and twisting shape.  Neither uttered a word, and except for the whir of the cowhide in the air, and the rasping sound of its arrest upon the body of Bittridge, the thing was done in perfect silence.  The witnesses stood well back in a daze, from which they recovered when Richard released Bittridge with a twist of the hand that tore his collar loose and left his cravat dangling, and tossed the frayed cowhide away, and turned and walked homeward.  Then one of them picked up Bittridge’s hat and set it aslant on his head, and others helped pull his collar together and tie his cravat.

For the few moments that Richard Kenton remained in sight they scarcely found words coherent enough for question, and when they did, Bittridge had nothing but confused answers to give to the effect that he did not know what it meant, but he would find out.  He got into a hack and had himself driven to his hotel, but he never made the inquiry which he threatened.