Quicker than lightning came that terrific right-hand cross-counter. Macpherson never even knew what happened to him. The canvasser's right hand, which had been adjusted by his inventor for a high blow, had landed on the butt of Macpherson's ear and dropped him like a fowl. The gasping, terrified bull-dog fled the scene, and the canvasser stood over his fallen foe, still intoning the virtues of his publication. He had come there merely as a friend, he said, to give the inhabitants of Ninemile a chance to buy a book which had recently earned the approval of King O'Malley and His Excellency the Governor-General.
The Genius and his mate watched this extraordinary drama through the window. The stimulant habitually consumed by the Ninemilers had induced in them a state of superlative Dutch courage, and they looked upon the whole affair as a wildly hilarious joke.
"By Gad! he's done him," said the Genius, as Macpherson went down, "done him in one hit. If he don't pay as a canvasser I'll take him to town and back him to fight Les Darcy. Look out for yourself; don't you handle him!" he continued as the other approached the figure. "Leave him to me. As like as not, if you get fooling about him, he'll give you a clout that'll paralyse you."So saying, he guided the automaton out of the office and into the street, and walked straight into a policeman.
By a common impulse the Genius and his mate ran rapidly away in different directions, leaving the figure alone with the officer.
He was a fully-ordained sergeant -- by name Aloysius O'Grady; a squat, rosy little Irishman. He hated violent arrests and all that sort of thing, and had a faculty of persuading drunks and disorderlies and other fractious persons to "go quietly along wid him," that was little short of marvellous. Excited revellers, who were being carried by their mates, struggling violently, would break away to prance gaily along to the lock- up with the sergeant. Obstinate drunks who had done nothing but lie on the ground and kick their feet in the air, would get up like birds, serpent- charmed, to go with him to durance vile.
As soon as he saw the canvasser, and noted his fixed, unearthly stare, and listened to his hoarse, unnatural voice, the sergeant knew what was the matter; it was a man in the horrors, a common enough spectacle at Ninemile. He resolved to decoy him into the lock-up, and accosted him in a friendly, free-and-easy way.
"Good day t'ye," he said.
"---- most magnificent volume ever published, jewelled in fourteen holes, working on a ruby roller, and in a glass case," said the book- canvasser. "The likenesses of the historical personages are so natural that the book must not be left open on the table, or the mosquitoes will ruin it by stinging the portraits."It then dawned on the sergeant that this was no mere case of the horrors -- he was dealing with a book-canvasser.
"Ah, sure," he said, "fwhat's the use uv tryin' to sell books at all, at all; folks does be peltin' them out into the street, and the nanny-goats lives on them these times. Oi send the childer out to pick 'em up, and we have 'em at me place in barrow-loads. Come along wid me now, and Oi'll make you nice and comfortable for the night," and he laid his hand on the outstretched palm of the figure.
It was a fatal mistake. He had set in motion the machinery which operated the figure's left arm, and it moved that limb in towards its body, and hugged the sergeant to its breast, with a vice-like grip. Then it started in a faltering and uneven, but dogged, way to walk towards the river.