THE FILIBUSTER

Pierre had determined to establish a kingdom, not for gain, but for
conquest's sake. But because he knew that the thing would pall, he took
with him Macavoy the giant, to make him king instead. But first he made
Macavoy from a lovely bully, a bulk of good-natured brag, into a Hercules
of fight; for, having made him insult--and be insulted by--near a score
of men at Fort O'Angel, he also made him fight them by twos, threes, and
fours, all on a summer's evening, and send them away broken. Macavoy
would have hesitated to go with Pierre, were it not that he feared a
woman. Not that he had wronged her; she had wronged him: she had married
him. And the fear of one's own wife is the worst fear in the world.

But though his heart went out to women, and his tongue was of the race
that beguiles, he stood to his "lines" like a man, and people wondered.
Even Wonta, the daughter of Foot-in-the-Sun, only bent him, she could not
break him to her will. Pierre turned her shy coaxing into irony--that was
on the day when all Fort O'Angel conspired to prove Macavoy a child and
not a warrior. But when she saw what she had done, and that the giant was
greater than his years of brag, she repented, and hung a dead coyote at
Pierre's door as a sign of her contempt.

Pierre watched Macavoy, sitting with a sponge of vinegar to his head, for
he had had nasty joltings in his great fight. A little laugh came
crinkling up to the half-breed's lips, but dissolved into silence.

"We'll start in the morning," he said.