They saw the half-wit boy now advance upon Don Lane with a roar or bawl of rage, his arms swinging flail-like. All expected to see the newcomer turn and run. Not so. He simply stood for a half instant, sidestepped, and again swung in close upon his foe. Old Silas Kneebone described the affair many a time afterwards, at a time when Spring Valley knew more about Don Lane. "You see, the eejit, he gets up again, hollering, and he goes in again at Dewdonny, bound for to knock his head off. But Dewdonny, he ducks down like a regular prize-fighter--I hear tell, at colleges, them athaletes they have to learn all them sort of things--and he put up a fight like a regular old hand. But all the time he keeps hollering to the crowd, 'Take him away! Take him away! Keep him off, I say! I don't want to hit him!' "Well, folks begun to laugh at Dewdonny then--before they knowed who he was--thinking he was afraid of that eejit; yet it didn't seem like he was, neither, for he didn't run away. At last he hits the eejit fair a second time, and he knocks him down flat. Folks then begun to allow he could hit him whenever he wanted to, and knock him down whenever he pleased. "Now, the eejit, he gets up and begins to beller like a calf. He puts his hand on his face where Dewdonny Lane had done hit him the last time or two and he hollers out, 'Pa, he hit me!' "But his pa could only set up on the grass and shake his head. I reckon old Eph was soberer then than he had been five minutes sooner. Say, that boy had a punch like the kick of a full growed mule! "Of course, you all know what happened then. It was then that old Man Tarbush come in, seeing the boy had both of them two licked. He got up his own nerve after that. So now he goes over there to the courthouse ground, through the gate where they all was, and he lays his hand on Dewdonny Lane and then on the eejit. "'I arrest you both for disturbing of the peace,' says he then. 'Come on now, in the name of the law.' "'The law be damned!' says Dewdonny Lane then. 'Go take this man to jail. Are you crazy--what do you mean by arresting me when I'm just walking home with my mother? This wasn't my fault. I didn't want to hit him. "'Come on, Mom!' says he, and before Tarbush could help hisself he'd took 'Rory Lane by the arm again and off they went, and right soon they was in their house--them two, the milliner and her boy. "And Joel Tarbush he heard him call her 'Mom' right there--that's how it all begun to git out. "That's right--this was the town milliner and the boy she sent away, that never died none at all nohow.--'Rory Lane, and her boy we all thought was dead. And we'd never knowed it nor dreamed it till he spoke, right there in the public square! 'My mother!' says he. Can you beat that? "Then 'Rory Lane turns around and fronts the whole lot of them. Says she: 'Yes, it's true! This is my son, Dewdonny Lane,' says she. She said it cold.