"What do you say now?" cried Rupert to his brother. His brother
said nothing now.
We all three strode down the street in silence, Rupert feverish,
myself dazed, Basil, to all appearance, merely dull. We walked
through grey street after grey street, turning corners, traversing
squares, scarcely meeting anyone, except occasional drunken knots
of two or three.
In one small street, however, the knots of two or three began
abruptly to thicken into knots of five or six and then into great
groups and then into a crowd. The crowd was stirring very slightly.
But anyone with a knowledge of the eternal populace knows that if
the outside rim of a crowd stirs ever so slightly it means that
there is madness in the heart and core of the mob. It soon became
evident that something really important had happened in the centre
of this excitement. We wormed our way to the front, with the
cunning which is known only to cockneys, and once there we soon
learned the nature of the difficulty. There had been a brawl
concerned with some six men, and one of them lay almost dead on the
stones of the street. Of the other four, all interesting matters
were, as far as we were concerned, swallowed up in one stupendous
fact. One of the four survivors of the brutal and perhaps fatal
scuffle was the immaculate Lieutenant Keith, his clothes torn to
ribbons, his eyes blazing, blood on his knuckles.
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