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The audience was breathless. Most now saw the grim reality of the scene before them; and when at last O’Ryan’s powerful right hand got a grip upon the throat of Jopp, and they saw the grip tighten, tighten, and Jopp’s face go from red to purple, a hundred people gasped. Excited men made as though to move toward the stage; but the majority still believed that it all belonged to the play, and shouted, “Sit down!”

Suddenly the voice of Gow Johnson was heard: “Don’t kill him–let go, boy!”

The voice rang out with sharp anxiety, and pierced the fog of passion and rage in which O’Ryan was moving. He realized what he was doing, the real sense of it came upon him. Suddenly he let go the lank throat of his enemy, and, by a supreme effort, flung him across the stage, where Jopp lay resting on his hands, his bleared eyes looking at Terry with the fear and horror still in them which had come with that tightening grip on his throat.

Silence fell suddenly on the theatre. The audience was standing. A woman sobbed somewhere in a far corner, but the rest were dismayed and speechless. A few steps before them all was Molly Mackinder, white and frightened, but in her eyes was a look of understanding as she gazed at Terry. Breathing hard, Terry stood still in the middle of the stage, the red fog not yet gone out of his eyes, his hands clasped at his side, vaguely realizing the audience again. Behind him was the back curtain, in which the lights of Orion twinkled aggressively. The three men who had attacked him were still where he had thrown them.

The silence was intense, the strain oppressive. But now a drawling voice came from the back of the hall.

“Are you watching the rise of Orion?” it said. It was the voice of Gow Johnson.

The strain was broken; the audience dissolved in laughter; but it was not hilarious; it was the nervous laughter of relief, touched off by a native humor always present in the dweller of the prairie.

“I beg your pardon,” said Terry, quietly and abstractedly, to the audience.

And the scene-shifter bethought himself and let down the curtain.

The fourth act was not played that night. The people had had more than the worth of their money. In a few moments the stage was crowded with people from the audience, but both Jopp and O’Ryan had disappeared.

Among the visitors to the stage was Molly Mackinder. There was a meaning smile upon her face as she said to Dicky Fergus:

“It was quite wonderful, wasn’t it–like a scene out of the classics–the gladiators or something?”

Fergus gave a wary smile as he answered: “Yes. I felt like saying ‘Ave, Caesar, ave!‘ and I watched to see Artemis drop her handkerchief.”

“She dropped it, but you were too busy to pick it up. It would have been a useful sling for your arm,” she added, with thoughtful malice. “It seemed so real–you all acted so well, so appropriately. And how you keep it up!” she added, as he cringed when some one knocked against his elbow, hurting the injured tendons.

Fergus looked at her meditatively before he answered. “Oh, I think we’ll likely keep it up for some time,” he rejoined, ironically.

“Then the play isn’t finished?” she added. “There is another act? Yes, I thought there was; the programme said four.”

“Oh yes, there’s another act,” he answered, “but it isn’t to be played now; and I’m not in it.”

“No, I suppose you are not in it. You really weren’t in the last act. Who will be in it?”

Fergus suddenly laughed outright as he looked at Holden expostulating intently to a crowd of people round him. “Well, honor bright, I don’t think there’ll be anybody in it except little Conny Jopp and gentle Terry O’Ryan; and Conny mayn’t be in it very long. But he’ll be in it for a while, I guess. You see, the curtain came down in the middle of a situation, not at the end of it. The curtain has to rise again.”