and kill him. Terry now played the part with a naturalness and force
which soon lifted the play away from the farcical element introduced into
it by those who had interpolated the gibes at himself. They had gone a
step too far.

"He's going large," said Gow Johnson, as the act drew near its close,
and the climax neared, where O'Ryan was to enter upon a physical struggle
with his assailants. "His blood's up. There'll be hell to pay."

To Gow Johnson the play had instantly become real, and O'Ryan an injured
man at bay, the victim of the act--not of the fictitious characters of
the play, but of the three men, Fergus, Holden, and Constantine Jopp, who
had planned the discomfiture of O'Ryan; and he felt that the victim's
resentment would fall heaviest on Constantine Jopp, the bully, an old
schoolmate of Terry's.

Jopp was older than O'Ryan by three years, which in men is little, but in
boys, at a certain time of life, is much. It means, generally, weight
and height, an advantage in a scrimmage. Constantine Jopp had been the
plague and tyrant of O'Ryan's boyhood. He was now a big, leering fellow
with much money of his own, got chiefly from the coal discovered on his
place by Vigon, the half-breed French Canadian. He had a sense of dark
and malicious humour, a long horse-like face, with little beady eyes and
a huge frame.

Again and again had Terry fought him as a boy at school, and often he had
been badly whipped, but he had never refused the challenge of an insult
when he was twelve and Jopp fifteen. The climax to their enmity at
school had come one day when Terry was seized with a cramp while bathing,
and after having gone down twice was rescued by Jopp, who dragged him out