Vaguely, through the smoke fog, Bromley saw a burly miner, bearded like a fictional pirate, beckoning the bar-room crowd up to the bar, weaving pistol in hand. Possibly, if he had been fully awake, he would have understood that the easy way to avoid trouble with a manifestly drunken roisterer was by the road of quietly following the example of the others. But before he could gather his faculties the big man had marked him down. “Hey, there--yuh li’l’ black-haired runt in th’ corner! Tail in yere afore I make yuh git up an’ dance fer th’ crowd!” he shouted. “I’m a rip-snortin’ hell-roarer fr’m ol’ Mizzoo, an’ this is my night fer flappin’ my wings--_yippee!_” Bromley was awake now and was foolish enough to laugh and wave the invitation aside airily. Instantly there was a flash and crash, and the window at his elbow was shattered. “L-laugh at me, will yuh!” stuttered the half-crazed celebrator. “Git up an’ come yere! I’m goin’ to make yuh drink a whole durn’ quart o’ red-eye fer that! Come a-runnin’, I say, afore I----” The door opened and Philip came in. He had heard the shot, but was wholly unprepared for what he saw; Bromley, his partner, white as a sheet and staggering to his feet at the menace of the revolver in the drunken miner’s fist; the shattered window and bar mirror; the group of card players and loungers crowding against the bar, and the barkeeper ducking to safety behind it. In the drawing of a breath a curious transformation came over him. Gone in an instant were all the inhibitions of a restrained and conventional childhood and youth, and in their room there was only a mad prompting to kill. At a bound he was upon the big man, and the very fierceness and suddenness of the barehanded attack made it successful. With his victim down on the sawdust-covered floor, and the pistol wrested out of his grasp, he swung the clubbed weapon to beat the fallen man over the head with it and would doubtless have had a human life to answer for if the bystanders had not rushed in to pull him off with cries of “Let up, stranger--let up! Can’t you see he’s drunk?” Philip stood aside, half-dazed, with the clubbed revolver still grasped by its barrel. He was gasping, not so much from the violence of his exertions as at the appalling glimpse he had been given of the potentialities within himself; of the purely primitive and savage underman that had so suddenly risen up to sweep away the last vestiges of the traditions, to make his tongue like a dry stick in his mouth with a mad thirst for blood.