oe before he
slept; he would do it at any sacrifice to his pride. He had conquered his
pride.

He dismounted, threw the bridle over a post, and, going into the garden,
knocked gently at the door. There was no response. He knocked again, and
listened intently. Now he heard a sound--like a smothered cry or groan. He
opened the door quickly and entered. It was dark. In another room beyond
was a light. From it came the same sound he had heard before, but louder;
also there was a shuffling footstep. Springing forward to the half-open
door, he pushed it wide, and met the terror-stricken eyes of Constantine
Jopp--the same look that he had seen at the theatre when his hands were on
Jopp's throat, but more ghastly.

Jopp was bound to a chair by a lasso. Both arms were fastened to the
chair-arm, and beneath them, on the floor, were bowls into which blood
dropped from his punctured wrists.

He had hardly taken it all in--the work of an instant--when he saw
crouched in a corner, madness in his eyes, his half-breed Vigon. He
grasped the situation in a flash. Vigon had gone mad, had lain in wait in
Jopp's house, and, when the man he hated had seated himself in the chair,
had lassoed him, bound him, and was slowly bleeding him to death.

He had no time to think. Before he could act Vigon was upon him also,
frenzy in his eyes, a knife clutched in his hand. Reason had fled, and he
only saw in O'Ryan the frustrator of his revenge. He had watched the drip,
drip from his victim's wrists with a dreadful joy.

They were man and man, but O'Ryan found in this grisly contest a vaster
trial of strength than in the fight upon the stage a few hours ago. The
first lunge that Vigon made struck him on the tip of the shoulder and drew
blood; but he caught the hand holding the knife in an iron grasp, while
the half-breed, with superhuman strength, tried in vain for the long,
brown throat of the man for whom he had struck oil. As they struggled and
twisted, the eyes of the victim in the chair watched them with agonized
emotions. For him it was life or death. He could not cry out--his mouth
was gagged; but to O'Ryan his groans were like a distant echo of his own
hoarse gasps as he fought his desperate fight. Terry was as one in an
awful dream battling with vague, impersonal powers which slowly strangled
his life, yet held him back in torture from the final surrender.

For minutes they struggled. At last O'Ryan's strength came to a point of
breaking