With a quick bend Mordecai lunged forward, put his hands behind his neck and grappled with the rascal straddling his back. One who'd tussled with the toughest of the young roughs Boston's waterfront produced knew every hold, fair and unfair, the wrestler's art could boast, and the would-be assassin catapulted to the pavement with a force that sent him slithering across the wet bricks, brought him up against a house-wall with a thud, and left him lying as inert as was his broken-headed companion.
"Citizen, are you unhurt?" asked Mordecai as he turned toward the person in the blanket.
The square of sopping cloth moved like an alligator wakening to sluggish life, and a face peered at him from an upraised corner. "They are gone, Citizen?" asked a girl's voice; then, as she saw him standing alone over her: "Do not make yourself anxious for me. I am of the good health." The blanket slipped away and she rose nimbly, unassisted, and looked at him through dripping light-brown curls.
"La, la" her laughter trilled deliciously, "we be a sorry-looking pair of mortals, you and I. Mon—Citizen. You are as wet as any drowned rat, and I must look like some old beldame ducked for scolding! Will not you come with me and dry yourself? My house is not so far away."
Mordecai bowed stiffly, with such dignity as he could muster while rivulets of water ran from sleeves and boots and collar. To be laughed at when one has saved a damsel in distress! "I shall take no illness from my wetting, Citizeness," he answered, "but perhaps it were as well I walked with you. You may meet with other rascals in the street, and find help less conveniently near."
She made a little growling noise deep in her throat, as one who mocks a harmless puppy's show of fierceness; then, as he offered no response, she tucked her small hand in the crook of his elbow and fell in step with him as demurely as a Boston maid upon her way to Sabbath worship.
They came to halt before the wicket gate of a walled garden, and she fished a little key from the reticule dangling at her wrist. "Entrez vous, s'il vons plait, et soyez le bienvenu." She took her dripping skirts between her thumbs and forefingers, lifted them an inch or so and bobbed him a small curtsy.
He hesitated for a moment, then bowed acknowlegdment of her invitation.
Three times she rapped upon the white door of the little house, waited for a breath, then rapped twice more. A shuffling step came from behind the portal and a candle's glow quickened in the side-lights by the door as the handle turned and the panels swung a scant six inches back to reveal a pair of bright, black, mouse-small eyes in an incredibly wrinkled face.
"Ma chérie, ma pauvre, ma petite!" croaked the aged portress. "Grace à Dieu, you have returned! I thought you had been lost, drowned in the rain, or, worse, that they had come upon you!"
"S-s-sh, Marjotte, not so loud!" the girl bade softly. "Let us in, and quickly, then light the fire and brew some chocolate for the Citizen. He is wet unto the skin"
"How of yourself, my little one; you too are doused," the old woman protested. "Let Marjotte get you dry clothing"
"Zut! I can attend my own wants.
