The Bars of Iron

Excerpt

“Fight?  I’ll fight you with pleasure, but I shall probably kill you if I do.  Do you want to be killed?” Brief and contemptuous the question fell.  The speaker was a mere lad.  He could not have been more than nineteen.  But he held himself with the superb British assurance that has its root in the British public school and which, once planted, in certain soils is wholly ineradicable.