danger signals in Jim before, but never with any ill
intent toward me. I was so astounded I could scarcely think aright.
What could he mean? What was the matter?

"Jim, Jim," I soothed, "don't talk that way to old friends."

"You're no friend of mine," he shouted. "Will you get out of here?"

In some respects, I was like Jim Darrol: I did not like to be ordered
about.

"No! I will not get out," I snapped back at him. "I mean to remain
here until you grow sensible."

I went over to his anvil, set my leg across it and looked straight at
him.

He raised his hammer high, as if to strike me; and I felt then that if
I had taken my eyes from Jim's for the briefest flash of time, my last
minute on earth would have arrived.

With an oath,--the first I ever heard him utter,--he cast the hammer
from him, sending it clattering into a corner among the old horse shoes.

"Damn you,--I hate you and all your cursed aristocratic breed," he
snarled. And, with the spring of a tiger, he had me by the throat,
with those great, grabbing hands of his, his fingers closing cruelly on
my windpipe as he tried to shake the life out of me.

I had always been able to account for Jim when it came to fisticuffs,
but never at close quarters. This time, his attack was violent as it
was unexpected. I did not have the ghost of a chance. I staggered
back against the furnace wall, still in his devilish clutch. Not a
gasp of air entered or left my body from the moment he clutched me.

He shook me as a terrier does a rat.

Soon my strength began to go; my eyes bulged; my head felt as if it
were bursting; dancing lights and awful darknesses flashed and loomed
alternately before and around me. Then the lights became scarcer and
the darknesses longer and more intense. As the last glimmer of
consciousness was leaving me, when black gloom had won and there was no
more light, I felt a sudden release, painful and almost unwelcome to
the oblivion to which I had been hurling. The lights came flashing
back to me again and out of the whirling chaos I began to grasp the
tangible once more. As I leaned against the side of the furnace,
pulling at my throat where those terrible fingers had
been,--gasping,--gasping,--for glorious life-giving, life-sustaining
air, I gradually began to see as through a haze. Before long, I was
almost myself again.

Jim was standing a few paces away, his chest heaving, his shaggy head
bent and his great hands clench