While they sat together before their turn Japhra would instruct what was to be learnt this time, and while they sparred "Remember!" Japhra would call, "Remember! Good! Good!--Weak! Weak!--Follow it! Follow it!--Speed's thy game!--Quick as thou canst sling them!--See how that hook leaves thee unguarded!--Again!--All open to me again!--Again!--ah, take it, then!" and _clip!_ to the unprotected stomach, savage as he could drive it, would come old Japhra's left; and Percival go gasping, and Ginger Cronk to the spectators: "With that terrible punch, gentlemen, Gipsy Japhra knocked out Boy Duggan and took the championship belt at Los Angeles. Put your hands together, gentlemen, and give 'em a 'earty clap." When the round was ended Japhra would go over it point by point. When they sat or walked together, at meals or on the road, he was forever imparting his advice, his knowledge, his experience. He waas never tired of teaching ... and Percival trained on. II There came a day when "Thou must go slow with me," Japhra said after they had finished their round. "I have put skill to thy youth and strength. Thou must go slow with me or the folks will see nothing of the parts I am to show them." There came a day when he was given demonstration--if he had cared to recognise it for such--that the van folk knew him for a clever one with his fists. Foxy Pinsent supplied it. In all the crowd of tough characters that made up Maddox's Royal Circus and Monster Menagerie with its attendant booths Foxy Pinsent alone gave him a supercilious lip or darkling scowl where others gave him smile and welcome. Foxy Pinsent had an old grudge against him--as Japhra had said--and lost no opportunity to rub it. The fact that "Japhra's Gentleman" was in the way of becoming a rival attraction to his own fame among the crowds that flocked to the fairs sharpened his spleen. The ever increasing bad blood between the two factions--Maddox's and Stingo's--gave him chance to exercise it. Percival came hot to Japhra one day: "Damn that man Pinsent, Japhra. He's going too far with me. He's been putting it about the vans that I am too much the gentleman to go with a Maddox man--that I said in his hearing I refused to go with Dingo Spain to buy bread yesterday because I would not be seen in his company by decent people." Japhra looked up at the angry face: "Let him bide. Let him bide." "I'm not afraid of him." "Nor I of adders, but I do not disturb their nests--nor lie in their ways." On a day the reason came for Percival to cross the adder's way. Egbert Hunt knocked over a bucket in which one of Pinsent's negro pugilists was about to wash. The man used his fists, then his boots, on Hunt, sending him back brutally used. Percival sought out the black, outfought him completely, and administered a punishing that appeared to him to meet the case. Then came Pinsent. "You've put your hands to one of my men, I hear--to Buck Osborn?" "An infernal bully," said Percival.