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The blood was trickling down Lime’s face from a cut on his cheek, but Steve’s face was swollen and ghastly from the three blows which he had received. Lime was saving himself for a supreme effort. The Nagle party, encouraged by the sound of the blows which Steve struck, began to yell and to show that they were ready to take a hand in the contest.

“Go it, Steve, we’ll back yeh! Give it to ‘im. We’re with yeh! We’ll tend to the rest.” They began to pull off their coats.

Rice also threw off his coat. “Never mind these cowards, Lime. Hold on! Fair play!” he yelled, as he saw young Nagle about to strike Lime from behind.

His cry startled Lime, and with a sudden leap he dealt Steve a terrible blow full in the face, and as he went reeling back made another leaping lunge and struck him to the ground–a motion that seemed impossible to one of his bulk. But as he did so one of the crowd tripped him and sent him rolling upon the prostrate Steve, whose friends leaped like a pack of snarling wolves upon Lime’s back. There came into the giant’s heart a terrible, blind, desperate resolution. With a hoarse, inarticulate cry he gathered himself for one supreme effort and rose from the heap like a bear shaking off a pack of dogs; and holding the stunned and nerveless Steve in his great hands, with one swift, incredible effort literally swept his opponent’s body in the faces of the infuriated men rushing down upon him.

“Come on, you red hellions!” he shouted, in a voice like a lion at bay. The light streamed on his bared head, his hands were clinched, his chest heaved in great gasps. There was no movement. The crowd waited with their hands lowered; before such a man they could not stand for a moment. They could not meet the blaze of his eyes. For a moment it seemed as if no one breathed.

In the silence that followed, Bill, who had kept gut of sight up to this moment, piped out in a high, weak falsetto, with a comically questioning accent: “All quiet along the Potomac, boys?”

Lime unbraced, wiped his face and laughed. The others joined in cautiously. “No, thank yez, none in mine,” said Sheehan, in answer to the challenge of Lime. “Whan Oi take to fightin’ stame-ingins Oi’ll lit you knaw.”

“Well, I should say so,” said another. “Lime, you’re the best man that walks this State.”

“Git out of the way, you white-livered hound, or I’ll blow hell out o’ yeh,” said Steve, who had recovered himself sufficiently to know what it all meant. He lay upon the grass behind the rest and was weakly trying to get his revolver sighted upon Lime. One of the men caught him by the shoulder and the rest yelled:

“Hyare, Steve, no shootin’. It was a fair go, and you’re whipped.”

Steve only repeated his warnings to get out of the way. Lime turned upon him and kicked the weapon from his outstretched hand, breaking his arm at the wrist. The bullet went flying harmlessly into the air, and the revolver hurtled away into the shadows.

Walking through the ring, Lime took John by the hand and said: “Come, boy, this is no place for you. Let’s go home. Fellers,” he drawled in his customary lazy way, “when y’ want me you know where to find me. Come, boys, the circus is over, the last dog is hung.”

For the first mile or two there was a good deal of talk, and Bill said he knew that Lime could whip the whole crowd.

“But where was you, Bill, about the time they had me down? I don’t remember hearin’ anything of you ‘long about that time, Bill.”

Bill had nothing to say.

“Made me think somehow of Daniel in the lions’ den,” said Johnny.

“What do you mean by that, Johnny?” said Bill. “It made me think of a circus. The circus there’ll be when Lime’s woman finds out what he’s been a-doin’.”

“Great Scott, boys, you mustn’t tell on me,” said Lime, in genuine alarm.

As for John, he lay with his head in Lime’s lap, looking up at the glory of the starlit night, and with a confused mingling of the play, of the voice of the lovely woman, of the shouts and blows at the brewery in his mind, and with the murmur of the river and the roll and rumble of the wagon blending in his ears, he fell into a sleep which the rhythmic beat of the horses’ hoofs did not interrupt.