Most Secret by John Dickson Carr Page B

who aches and burns to settle a score with his betters …”
    “Oh, come!” said Roderick Kinsmere, with a little pulse jigging in his arm. “ You are the man desirous of trouble, my bucko. You will force a quarrel at any cost. Yet why should you wish this, against one you never saw before. Why?”
    “If there be any such lout, and he should have anything he would desire to say to me, let him walk quietly at my side and say it. Let him not raise hand like a stableboy; let him try to behave, though he can’t, as a gentleman might. Let him walk beside me, I repeat.” Then the bored voice grew louder and harsher. “This way. This way. This way !”

IV
    F OR THE FIRST TIME the captain looked full at him, bending forward a little to do so. They measured each other. The glazed dark eye, the long nose, the thick upper lip to narrow mouth: all these, framed in the coils of a great periwig, were thrust almost into Kinsmere’s face.
    Then the captain, muscular and sneer-poised in his long red coat, baldric and rapier gleaming against it, lifted one shoulder and stalked carelessly towards the southeast part of the Great Court.
    At the southeast end of the courtyard an open passage—perhaps a dozen feet wide, with muddy cobblestones underfoot—stretched between blank walls towards the public water stairs above the Thames.
    On one side of this passage, your left as you entered it, ran the brick wall of the palace kitchens. On the other side rose up the stone wall of the Great Hall itself. It would be only an hour until midday-dinner time. Though no sound issued from the Great Hall, which they used as a playhouse, the whole length of the kitchens clanked and smoked at meal heat.
    After looking round sharply, as though to make sure they were unobserved, the captain led Kinsmere into this passage. It was gloomy here; gnats buzzed in their faces.
    And then:
    “Stop!” cries the captain, half wheeling.
    “With right good will,” says my grandfather. He halted with his back to the kitchen wall. “But how now, Bold Sir Captain and Cock of the Sneerers? Do you deign at length to mark the bumpkin’s existence? Hath it penetrated into your noodle that I am alive?”
    The other seemed almost convulsed.
    “Alive!” he repeated. “Alive! It breathes; it moves; it speaks almost intelligibly, as though the clod were a human being. Yes, poor bumpkin! You are in some sense alive, let’s allow, though for your insolence to me you are not like to remain alive. Now hearken well, good lout, while your betters shall put a question. You wear a sword, like so many who can’t use ’em. You wear a sword, but do you know swordplay?”
    “Yes. A little.”
    “‘A little,’ says he. A little!” Again the captain seemed almost convulsed. “Come, here’s a jest. Come, gods and omens of all this earth, here’s a jest most monstrous rich! Of swordplay, the lout saith, he knows a little. Ay, good bumpkin, I may guess how very little. And yet, if the thing can be managed discreetly or without noise, I may take pity. I may award you more honour than you deserve.”
    “More honour than I deserve? What honour?”
    “The honour,” retorted his companion, “to be spitted through the guts by my sword.”
    And he lunged forward, breathing hard in Kinsmere’s face. With his gloved left hand he pinned my grandfather’s right shoulder against the wall.
    “I address you, bumpkin,” he said loftily.
    “Remove your hand! Desist! Stand back!”
    “Have you ears, oaf? I said I address you!”
    “The words were heard. Will you remove that hand?”
    “I use my pleasure at all times.”
    “Do you so?”
    “Indeed I do,” said the captain, leering close.
    And that did it.
    “I have pledged myself to good deportment. I have sworn an oath to use civility towards all. And yet, by God, this goes something too far. For the last time, will you drop your hand?”
    “Ay, good zany. But I drop it, mark me, only the better to do this.”
    The captain’s