’"As far as I know, I haven’t opened my lips in your hearing,” I affirmed with perfect truth.  I was getting a little angry, too, at the absurdity of this encounter.  It strikes me now I have never in my life been so near a beating—­I mean it literally; a beating with fists.  I suppose I had some hazy prescience of that eventuality being in the air.  Not that he was actively threatening me.  On the contrary, he was strangely passive—­don’t you know? but he was lowering, and, though not exceptionally big, he looked generally fit to demolish a wall.  The most reassuring symptom I noticed was a kind of slow and ponderous hesitation, which I took as a tribute to the evident sincerity of my manner and of my tone.  We faced each other.  In the court the assault case was proceeding.  I caught the words:  “Well—­buffalo—­stick—­in the greatness of my fear. . . .”

’"What did you mean by staring at me all the morning?” said Jim at last.  He looked up and looked down again.  “Did you expect us all to sit with downcast eyes out of regard for your susceptibilities?” I retorted sharply.  I was not going to submit meekly to any of his nonsense.  He raised his eyes again, and this time continued to look me straight in the face.  “No.  That’s all right,” he pronounced with an air of deliberating with himself upon the truth of this statement—­“that’s all right.  I am going through with that.  Only”—­and there he spoke a little faster—­“I won’t let any man call me names outside this court.  There was a fellow with you.  You spoke to him—­oh yes—­I know; ’tis all very fine.  You spoke to him, but you meant me to hear. . . .”

’I assured him he was under some extraordinary delusion.  I had no conception how it came about.  “You thought I would be afraid to resent this,” he said, with just a faint tinge of bitterness.  I was interested enough to discern the slightest shades of expression, but I was not in the least enlightened; yet I don’t know what in these words, or perhaps just the intonation of that phrase, induced me suddenly to make all possible allowances for him.  I ceased to be annoyed at my unexpected predicament.  It was some mistake on his part; he was blundering, and I had an intuition that the blunder was of an odious, of an unfortunate nature.  I was anxious to end this scene on grounds of decency, just as one is anxious to cut short some unprovoked and abominable confidence.  The funniest part was, that in the midst of all these considerations of the higher order I was conscious of a certain trepidation as to the possibility—­nay, likelihood—­of this encounter ending in some disreputable brawl which could not possibly be explained, and would make me ridiculous.  I did not hanker after a three days’ celebrity as the man who got a black eye or something of the sort from the mate of the Patna.  He, in all probability, did not care what he did, or at any rate would be fully justified in his own eyes.  It took no magician to see he