“There’s the fellow,” said Cecil laconically, and strode toward him with his long, lounging cavalry swing.  The man turned pallid under his florid skin, and tried to edge imperceptibly away; but the density of the throng prevented his moving quickly enough to evade Cecil, who stooped his head, and said a word in his ear.  It was briefly: 

“Leave the ring.”

The rascal, half bully, half coward, rallied from the startled fear into which his first recognition by the Guardsman (who had been the chief witness against him in a very scandalous matter at York, and who had warned him that if he ever saw him again in the Ring he would have him turned out of it) had thrown him, and, relying on insolence and the numbers of his fraternity to back him out of it, stood his ground.

“I’ve as much right here as you swells,” he said, with a hoarse laugh.  “Are you the whole Jockey Club, that you come it to a honest gentleman like that?”

Cecil looked down on him slightly amused, immeasurably disgusted—­of all earth’s terrors, there was not one so great for him as a scene, and the eager bloodshot eyes of the Ring were turning on them by the thousand, and the loud shouting of the bookmakers was thundering out, “What’s up?”

“My ‘honest gentleman,’” he said wearily, “leave this.  I tell you; do you hear?”

“Make me!” retorted the “welsher,” defiant in his stout-built square strength, and ready to brazen the matter out.  “Make me, my cock o’ fine feathers!  Put me out of the ring if you can, Mr. Dainty Limbs!  I’ve as much business here as you.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth before, light as a deer and close as steel, Cecil’s hand was on his collar, and without any seeming effort, without the slightest passion, he calmly lifted him off the ground, as though he were a terrier, and thrust him through the throng; Ben Davis, as the welsher was named, meantime being so amazed at such unlooked-for might in the grasp of the gentlest, idlest, most gracefully made, and indolently tempered of his born foes and prey, “the swells,” that he let himself be forced along backward in sheer passive paralysis of astonishment, while Bertie, profoundly insensible to the tumult that began to rise and roar about him, from those who were not too absorbed in the business of the morning to note what took place, thrust him along in the single clasp of his right hand outward to where the running ground swept past the Stand, and threw him lightly, easily, just as one may throw a lap-dog to take his bath, into the artificial ditch filled with water that the Seraph had pointed out as “a teaser.”  The man fell unhurt, unbruised, so gently was he dropped on his back among the muddy, chilly water, and the overhanging brambles; and, as he rose from the ducking, a shudder of ferocious and filthy oaths poured from his lips, increased tenfold by the uproarious laughter of the crowd, who knew him as “a welsher,” and thought him only too well served.