“Why?”
“Don’t you know the secret of his birth?”
“No! has he got a secret of his birth?”
“You bet he has.”
“What is it?”
“His father was a wax-figger.”
Allen came strolling by where the pair were sitting; stopped, and said to
the tinner;
“How are you off for friends, these days?”
“Well enough off.”
“Got a good many?”
“Well, as many as I need.”
“A friend is valuable, sometimes-as a protector, you know. What do you
reckon would happen if I was to snatch your cap off and slap you in the
face with it?”
“Please don’t trouble me, Mr. Allen, I ain’t doing anything to you.”
You answer me! What do you reckon would happen?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
Tracy spoke up with a good deal of deliberation and said:
“Don’t trouble the young fellow, I can tell you what would happen.”
“Oh, you can, can you? Boys, Johnny Bull can tell us what would happen
if I was to snatch this chump’s cap off and slap him in the face with it.
Now you’ll see.
He snatched the cap and struck the youth in the face, and before he could
inquire what was going to happen, it had already happened, and he was
warming the tin with the broad of his back. Instantly there was a rush,
and shouts of:
“A ring, a ring, make a ring! Fair play all round! Johnny’s grit; give
him a chance.”
The ring was quickly chalked on the tin, and Tracy found himself as eager
to begin as he could have been if his antagonist had been a prince
instead of a mechanic. At bottom he was a little surprised at this,
because although his theories had been all in that direction for some
time, he was not prepared to find himself actually eager to measure
strength with quite so common a man as this ruffian. In a moment all the
windows in the neighborhood were filled with people, and the roofs also.
The men squared off, and the fight began. But Allen stood no chance
whatever, against the young Englishman. Neither in muscle nor in science
was he his equal. He measured his length on the tin time and again;
in fact, as fast as he could get up he went down again, and the applause
was kept up in liberal fashion from all the neighborhood around.
Finally, Allen had to be helped up. Then Tracy declined to punish him
further and the fight was at an end. Allen was carried off by some of
his friends in a very much humbled condition, his face black and blue and
bleeding, and Tracy was at once surrounded by the young fellows, who
congratulated him, and told him that he had done the whole house a
service, and that from this out Mr. Allen would be a little more
particular about how he handled slights and insults and maltreatment
around amongst the boarders.
Tracy was a hero now, and exceedingly popular. Perhaps nobody had ever
been quite so popular on that upper floor before. But if being
discountenanced by these young fellows had been hard to bear, their
lavish commendations and approval and hero-worship was harder still to
endure. He felt degraded, but he did not allow himself to analyze the
reasons why, too closely. He was content to satisfy himself with the
suggestion that he looked upon himself as degraded by the public
spectacle which he had made of himself, fighting on a tin roof, for the
delectation of everybody a block or two around. But he wasn’t entirely
satisfied with that explanation of it. Once he went a little too far and
wrote in his diary that his case was worse than that of the prodigal son.
He said the prodigal son merely fed swine, he didn’t have to chum with
them. But he struck that out, and said “All men are equal. I will not
disown my principles. These men are as good as I am.”
Tracy was become popular on the lower floors also. Everybody was
grateful for Allen’s reduction to the ranks, and for his transformation
from a doer of outrages to a mere threatener of them. The young girls,