All at once he heard a battle cry and, turning, beheld the Coffee-colored Angel and the White Mountain Canary spring from their concealment and bear down upon him with unmistakable intent. Now, whether in a former existence Dink had been parent to the fox, or whether the purely human instinct was quicker than the reason, before he knew what he had done he had bounded forward and burst for home in full flight, with his heart pumping at his ribs. Easily distancing his pursuers, he arrived at the Green House before it dawned upon him that he had been challenged and run away. He stopped abruptly with clenched fists, breathing deep. "Now let them come," he said, turning. But the Coffee-colored Angel and the White Mountain Canary, having abandoned the hopeless chase, had gone another way. Angry and ashamed, Dink went to his room, vowing terrific vengeance. He planted himself before the mirror and, doubling up either arm, felt the well-hardened muscles. "There were two of them, and I didn't have time to think," he said. "I'll fight 'em--any of 'em." Reassured by the scowling ferocity of his reflected countenance, he turned away. But, passing near the window, he saw the Coffee-colored Angel and the White Mountain Canary come militantly up the stone walk. A moment later their steps sounded on the stairs. He went hastily to the door and shot the key. An instant later the door was tried, and then the contemptuous face of the Coffee-colored Angel loomed through the transom. "I knew you were yellow the moment I looked at you," he said scornfully. "Pah!" Dink did not answer. He was all in a whirl. His action in locking the door, so contrary to his heroic resolutions, left him in confusion. "I wonder if I really am afraid," he said, sitting down-all in a heap. The look in the Coffee-colored Angel's eye had brought him an unpleasant creeping sensation in the region of the back. And yet the Coffee-colored Angel, bone for bone and inch for inch, was just what he was--only he had fled from him, inadvertently, instinctively, it is true, yet feeling the running menace at his back. "I'm a coward!" he said, staring at the opposite wall. "I must be a coward! If I weren't I would have opened that door." Now, Dink had never fought a real fight. He had had a few rough-and-tumble skirmishes, but a fight where you stood up and looked a man in the whites of the eyes, a deliberate, planned-out fight, was outside his knowledge, in the mists of the unknown. And so his imagination--which later should be his strength--recoiled before that unknown as it had recoiled the moment he stepped from the stage to face his new judges; as it had recoiled in the hushed parlor before the closed door of the head master's den, and again at the thought of stepping into the batter's box and risking his head against the deadly shoots of Nick Carter, of the Cleve. He had never fought, therefore he was aghast at the fear of being afraid.