w
interpolated certain phrases meant to warn Constantine, and to excite
him to anger also.

The moment came upon them sooner than the text of the play warranted.
O'Ryan deliberately left out several sentences, and gave a later cue,
and the struggle for his capture was precipitated. Terry meant to make
the struggle real. So thrilling had been the scene that to an extent the
audience was prepared for what followed; but they did not grasp the full
reality--that the play was now only a vehicle for a personal issue of a
desperate character. No one had ever seen O'Ryan angry; and now that the
demon of rage was on him, directed by a will suddenly grown to its full
height, they saw not only a powerful character in a powerful melodrama,
but a man of wild force. When the three desperadoes closed in on O'Ryan,
and, with a blow from the shoulder which was not a pretence, he sent
Holden into a far corner gasping for breath and moaning with pain,
the audience broke out into wild cheering. It was superb acting,
they thought. As most of them had never seen the play, they were not
surprised when Holden did not again join the attack on the
deputy sheriff. Those who did know the drama--among them Molly
Mackinder--became dismayed, then anxious. Fergus and Jopp knew well from
the blow O'Ryan had given that, unless they could drag him down, the end
must be disaster to some one. They were struggling with him for personal
safety now. The play was forgotten, though mechanically O'Ryan and
Fergus repeated the exclamations and the few phrases belonging to the
part. Jopp was silent, fighting with a malice which belongs to only
half-breed, or half-bred, natures; and from far back in his own nature
the distant Indian strain in him was working in savage hatred. The two
were desperately hanging on to O'Ryan like pumas on a grizzly, when
suddenly, with a twist he had learned from Ogami the Jap on the Smoky
River, the slim Fergus was slung backward to the ground with the tendons
of his arm strained and the arm itself useless for further work. There
remained now Constantine Jopp, heavier and more powerful than O'Ryan.

For O'Ryan the theatre, the people, disappeared. He was a boy again on
the village green, with the bully before him who had tortured his young
days. He forgot the old debt to the foe who saved his life; he forgot
everything, except that once again, as of old, Constantine Jopp was
fighting him, with long, strong arms trying to bring him to