It is as if some malevolent fiend wakes in me, to fight.... A .45 automatic was slung under my armpit, but that mad demon had neither knowledge nor need of the weapon. I was conscious of an unseeing, savage fury that flung me at the giant. Then scarlet chaos ruled my brain.... When it ebbed away, Valyne was pulling at my shoulder with frantic hands. "Come, Clay!" her urgent voice was pleading. "You've done enough to him. Too much----" Her voice released the cold shock of sanity. The bearded man was lying in the muddy road, gasping hoarsely for breath. Fresh blood, now, was mingled with the dry on his overalls. His lips were crushed to a crimson pulp, and two of his front teeth were gone. * * * * * A faint sickness came into me, to see what I had done. Once in Singapore two Macanese attacked me in a dark alley, with knives, and when my mind had cleared of its scarlet madness, their heads had been almost severed with their own weapons. Since then I have walked in dread of that indwelling fiend.... But the bearded man was able to stand up, when I aided him. His bulging eyes stared at me, and then at Valyne, without any expression that I could read. He cleared his throat, and spat a scarlet stream of teeth and blood. He pulled out a big, nickel-plated watch, that ticked like a clock, and looked at it sullenly. Then, without a word, he went down the road toward the village, reeling like a drunken man. I wished that he had cursed or blustered. There is deadly menace in the silence of a beaten man. His glassy, inscrutable eyes had given no hint of what hellish thoughts might be passing through his twisted, brutish brain. Valyne called for my handkerchief, and bound it around my bleeding knuckles. "I'm sorry," I told her. "I'm not myself, when I fight. I might have killed him----" She looked after the staggering figure, and her violet eyes were dark with dread. "I'm glad--glad you beat him," she said, in a small, shuddery voice. "It was terrible to watch. But I've been so afraid! He's so strange, so dreadful! Perhaps now he'll let me alone. "He's Jud Geer," she added, "the butcher." I remembered Jud Geer, the butcher's son. He had been a queer, slow-witted bully. We smaller boys had dreaded him. It had been his perverted delight to torture us with gruesome objects from his father's shop, as when he bound and gagged little Tommy Lanning with the entrails of swine, and left him lying all night in a pool of blood and offal, where the rats came.... When Valyne had done with the bandage, I grasped her small hands. She smiled at me. A queer, sharp little pain came into my throat, for her beauty was more exquisite than all my memories and dreams. I yearned to brush the haunting shadow from her pale face, to keep this strong lamp of joy burning for ever in her violet eyes. "He doesn't matter," I told her, "Valyne darling." It was sheer delight to be calling her that again, after seven grim and bitter years.