A liquid containing roughly fifty-five per cent of alcohol acts like mild vitriol on the tender membranes of the eyeball. For a few seconds Robin felt as if a flame had seared him. He was blind, blind and in pain. His hands, groping, caught an end of the silk scarf draped about his neck. With that he dabbed at his burning eyes. They cleared. With tear ducts flooding, with the sting and burn well-nigh unendurable, still after a fashion he could see. Thatcher held his aggressive pose, his right hand by his side with the elbow crooked so that his fingers were even with the curved grip of the gun which he wore on his belt--where most of the others carried their six-shooters modestly tucked out of sight in the waistband of their trousers. Near him Mark Steele leaned on the bar, impassively watching. Thatcher’s face cracked in a wide grin and something happened in Robin Tyler’s breast. He didn’t quite know what it was. He had never in his careless young life struck a blow nor fired a shot in anger. He had never even speculated upon himself as a fighting animal. But for all his deceptive slimness he was a powerful man, lithe, hard, active as a cat, with untapped and unreckonable reservoirs of nervous energy. What he did was to take a step toward Thatcher. What he meant to do Robin himself scarcely knew, except that he was going to do something. When the Texan’s fingers closed on his pistol grip Robin leaped at him like a sprinter off the mark so that all the weight of his body as well as the spear-like thrust of his arm was behind the fist that caught Thatcher on the point of his chin. The Texan went down backward as if a horse had kicked him. His head and shoulders hit the floor while his spurred heels flipped upward. The back of his head banged like a hammer on the foot rail that ran along the base of the bar. He lay where he fell, blood oozing out of his mouth and nostrils, his arms limp, scarcely a muscle twitching. The dozen-odd men in the room stood still, hushed, almost holding their breath. A man’s fist beating a tentative gun play was rare in the cow country--and the man was little more than a boy, a boy they all liked. There was something about him as he stood there panting, with clenched hands, that made them very quiet, made their faces sober. Then Mark Steele laughed, a queer mirthless sound. “Well, well,” said he. “If somebody took an ax and chopped about forty pounds off John L. Sullivan maybe we could match Tyler with him.” The red mist flashed again before Robin’s smarting eyeballs. But he didn’t try to hit Mark Steele. He didn’t want to touch Steele with his hands. He wanted to destroy him. Somehow he knew that Steele had taken a new tack, that he had started Tommy Thatcher on him. And there was only one answer to Steele, anyway. Thatcher didn’t count. Robin made a dive for the Colt sticking out of Thatcher’s scabbard. Live or die he would put an end to this.