between Jopp and Terry, and he observed with anxiety that Terry now
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