It would doubtless have been extended had not the quick and agile Jerry forestalled the heavy mountaineers. He lifted Corbin with a mighty effort; he even carried out his boast of jumping—not high, after all, but high enough for the wildly clutching old man to catch the low beam with both hands. Binwell suddenly loosed his hold and left him swaying ponderously to and fro, two or three feet from the floor, in imminent danger of falling, sputtering and wheezing, and red in the face and with eyes starting out of his head. Then his tormentor, fearful doubtless of the recoil of public opinion, caught up his hat and coat and with a loud scornful laugh ran out of the store and disappeared up the leafy road. To a man of ordinary weight and agility it would have been easy enough to spring to the floor. But the cumbersome bulk and slow, clumsy habit of old Corbin lent the situation real danger. There was a rush to his assistance—some officious hand thrust an empty barrel beneath his feet, hoping to afford him support, but it toppled under his weight and down he came, amidst a great rending of staves, as the barrel collapsed beneath him. He was unhurt, although greatly shaken. He had been frightened at first; perhaps there was never so angry a man in the limits of the Cove as he was now. Again and again, as he was helped to his chair, he declared that he would revenge himself on Jerry Binwell, and the sympathetic crowd expressed their sense of the injury and the danger to which he had been subjected, as well as the indignity offered him. To Ike’s extreme amazement Binwell’s name was often coupled with that of his father, or the blind man, his uncle. Now, ordinarily, Ike would have felt that these two spirited and responsible people were amply able to answer for themselves; but he knew that it was only by an odd combination of circumstances that they were associated, almost with the intimacy of family relations, with such a person as Binwell. It implied a friendship for him which he knew they did not feel, and an indorsement of him which they were not prepared to give. Secure in their own sense of rectitude and good repute this possibility of a decline in public esteem had never, he was sure, occurred to them. Alas, Rosamondy, he heartily regretted that she had ever put her dimpled foot across their threshold, and yet he stipulated again within himself that it was not in his heart to wish any houseless creatures out of the shelter they had found.