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The silence of the two men apparently increased the ruffian’s rage and embarrassment. Suddenly he leaped into the air with a whoop and clumsily executed a negro double shuffle on the floor, which jarred the glasses–yet was otherwise so singularly ineffective and void of purpose that he stopped in the midst of it and had to content himself with glaring at Kane.

“Well,” said Kane quietly, “what does all this mean? What do you want here?”

“What does it mean?” repeated the bully, finding his voice in a high falsetto, designed to imitate Kane’s. “It means I’m going to play merry h-ll with this shop! It means I’m goin’ to clean it out and the blank hair-cuttin’ blank that keeps it. What do I want here? Well–what I want I intend to help myself to, and all h-ll can’t stop me! And” (working himself to the striking point) “who the blank are you to ask me?” He sprang towards the counter, but at the same moment Allen seemed to slip almost imperceptibly and noiselessly between them, and Kane found himself confronted only by the miner’s broad back.

“Hol’ yer hosses, stranger,” said Allen slowly, as the ruffian suddenly collided with his impassive figure. “I’m a sick man comin’ in yer for medicine. I’ve got somethin’ wrong with my heart, and goin’s on like this yer kinder sets it to thumpin’.”

“Blank you and your blank heart!” screamed the bully, turning in a fury of amazement and contempt at this impotent interruption. “Who”–but his voice stopped. Allen’s powerful right arm had passed over his head and shoulders like a steel hoop, and pinioned his elbows against his sides. Held rigidly upright, he attempted to kick, but Allen’s right leg here advanced, and firmly held his lower limbs against the counter that shook to his struggles and blasphemous outcries. Allen turned quietly to Kane, and, with a gesture of his unemployed arm, said confidentially:

“Would ye mind passing me down that ar Romantic Spirits of Ammonyer ye gave me last night?”

Kane caught the idea, and handed him the bottle.

“Thar,” said Allen, taking out the stopper and holding the pungent spirit against the bully’s dilated nostrils and vociferous mouth, “thar, smell that, and taste it, it will do ye good; it was powerful kammin’ to ME last night.”

The ruffian gasped, coughed, choked, but his blaspheming voice died away in a suffocating hiccough.

“Thar,” continued Allen, as his now subdued captive relaxed his struggling, “ye ‘r’ better, and so am I. It’s quieter here now, and ye ain’t affectin’ my heart so bad. A little fresh air will make us both all right.” He turned again to Kane in his former subdued confidential manner.

“Would ye mind openin’ that door?”

Kane flew to the door, unlocked it, and held it wide open. The bully again began to struggle, but a second inhalation of the hartshorn quelled him, and enabled his captor to drag him to the door. As they emerged upon the sidewalk, the bully, with a final desperate struggle, freed his arm and grasped his pistol at his hip-pocket, but at the same moment Allen deliberately caught his hand, and with a powerful side throw cast him on the pavement, retaining the weapon in his own hand. “I’ve one of my own,” he said to the prostrate man, “but I reckon I’ll keep this yer too, until you’re better.”

The crowd that had collected quickly, recognizing the notorious and discomfited bully, were not of a class to offer him any sympathy, and he slunk away followed by their jeers. Allen returned quietly to the shop. Kane was profuse in his thanks, and yet oppressed with his simple friend’s fatuous admiration for a woman who could keep such ruffians in her employ. “You know who that man was, I suppose?” he said.

“I reckon it was that ‘er prize-fighter belongin’ to that high-toned lady,” returned Allen simply. “But he don’t know anything about RASTLIN’, b’gosh; only that I was afraid o’ bringin’ on that heart trouble, I mout hev hurt him bad.”