At length, employing a wrestling device, Caine managed to drag the unprepared Fighter backward, from behind; and by a sudden wrench to throw him to one side. Still keeping behind Conover, out of reach of the hammer-fists, the slighter man succeeded in pinioning Caleb’s arms by slipping his own hands and wrists between the other’s elbows and his body. Trussed up, helpless as he was, Caleb writhed and snarled like a leashed bulldog. In another moment he would have wrenched himself free by dint of main force, had not Caine’s voice at last penetrated the red wrath-mists of his brain. “Conover!” his friend was shouting, for the tenth time, “if you kill him, Miss Shevlin’s name will be brought into the affair! Can’t you see that? If--” Conover’s iron-tense muscles relaxed. The orgasm of Berserk rage had passed, leaving him spent and apathetic. Caine knew that sanity had returned to the Fighter, and he released his grip on the mighty arms. “Well!” he observed, facing the dazed, panting man, and setting to rights his own tumbled clothing, “You are a nice specimen of humanity to have at large in a civilized country! You might have killed him. You _would_ have killed him, I believe, if I hadn’t come when I did. I got to thinking over what you said at the State House and I was afraid something like this would happen. So I came on. Just in time, I think.” Caine, as he spoke, had knelt beside the battered, bleeding Thing on the floor. Now he crossed to the washstand and came back with a soaked towel. Talking as he worked over the unconscious figure, he added: “You were right to thrash him. He richly deserved it. But, why the deuce did you keep on pummeling him while he was down? Does that strike you as sportsmanlike?” “Sportsmanlike?” panted Conover, his big voice still shaking with ground-swells of the storm that had mastered him, “Sportsmanlike, hey? D’ye s’pose I came here for a measly athletic contest? I came here to lick that curly, perfumed whelp. An’ I did it.” “You hit him when he was down,” answered Caine, crossing again from the washstand and dashing cold water in Blacarda’s shapeless face. “And--” “Of course I hit him when he was down!” snorted Caleb. “What d’ye s’pose I was goin’ to do? Help him up an’ brush off his clo’es? Gee, it makes me sick to hear that old fossil rot about ‘not hittin’ a man when he’s down!’ What in thunder’s the use of gettin’ him down if you ain’t goin’ to hit him? I didn’t come here for a friendly boxin’ bout. I came to pay Blacarda off. An’ he wasn’t to be paid off by one little tap that’d knock him over. That was just the start. I guess he’ll know enough by now to let Dey Shevlin’s name alone.” Caine made no answer. He was deftly applying the simple prize-ring expedients for restoring beaten pugilists to their senses. Conover looked down at him in profound contempt.