There was going to be a fight, Miles guessed, but though at another time he might have been secretly glad at the prospect of such excitement, he had seen one man knocked flat that day, and it had not been amusing, so now he was not over-zealous for the sport. "Come back and fish, Ned," he coaxed, plucking at his companion's sleeve, when that very moment, on the hillside below them, both caught the sound of an axe falling on wood.
After that Miles scrambled down the slope, eager as Ned himself, in his curiosity to see what would follow. A little clearing it was they came out in, where one tree had been newly felled, and its clean stump showed yellow; by the tree trunk, leaning on his axe and wiping his sweaty forehead with his sleeve, stood Dotey.
"Well, Neddy, I've come to talk with you," Lister greeted him, in a fleering voice, and on the word set himself down on the stump, with his hands clasped about one knee.
At first it was a talking, that lay all on Ned's side, while Dotey tried to keep up a pretense of work. Ned spoke words, well-chosen and stinging, that should make even stolid Dotey wince, and spoke them in a jibing tone, with a hateful laugh that startled Miles, even more than the sight of the little pulsing motion of the blood in Ned's dark cheeks.
Dotey swung round impatiently at last. "Hold your tongue, will you?" he cried.
"It is thou who wert better have held thy tongue, Neddy, before thou wentst blabbing to Hopkins of what passed between us."
"Thou art a liar," quoth Ned, quietly, and still hugging his knee.
Then Dotey strode over to him, and Ned, laughing up into his face, jeered at him, "threaten a man with his fists, would he, when he had just set Hopkins on to rebuke him for the like offense;" but at length he rose up and cast his mocking manner. "We are agreed there is one Edward too many in the house," he said slowly. "Now say we despatch one forth of it. Will you fight me like a gentleman, rapier and dagger?"
In a daze Miles listened to Dotey's first protests, Ned's taunts, till the final agreement was struck and the arrangements made. "I'll contrive to fetch rapier and dagger from the Captain's house," Ned concluded, "and do you, Miles, take those that hang in Hopkins's chamber, and bring them unto us behind the Fort Hill."