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Jim. He was no longer strung up to the desperate pitch of the first
encounter. But he was grave and anxious. Uncle Jim had shrunken, as
all antagonists that are boldly faced shrink, after the first battle,
to the negotiable, the vulnerable. Formidable he was no doubt, but not
invincible. He had, under Providence, been defeated once, and he might
be defeated altogether.
Mr. Polly went about the place considering the militant possibilities
of pacific things, pokers, copper sticks, garden implements, kitchen
knives, garden nets, barbed wire, oars, clothes lines, blankets,
pewter pots, stockings and broken bottles. He prepared a club with a
stocking and a bottle inside upon the best East End model. He swung it
round his head once, broke an outhouse window with a flying fragment
of glass, and ruined the stocking beyond all darning. He developed a
subtle scheme with the cellar flap as a sort of pitfall, but he
rejected it finally because (A) it might entrap the plump woman, and
(B) he had no use whatever for Uncle Jim in the cellar. He determined
to wire the garden that evening, burglar fashion, against the
possibilities of a night attack.
Towards two o'clock in the afternoon three young men arrived in a
capacious boat from the direction of Lammam, and asked permission to
camp in the paddock. It was given all the more readily by Mr. Polly
because he perceived in their proximity a possible check upon the
self-expression of Uncle Jim. But he did not foresee and no one could
have foreseen that Uncle Jim, stealing unawares upon the Potwell Inn
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