“Great fortune!” he mentally exclaimed. “This is the fellow who married Vida Melburn, Isa’s half-sister, and he thinks this girl is his wife! They used to look so much alike that it was difficult to tell one from the other.
“Married—married to you?” cried the girl. “Not on your life! Why, I never saw you before, although I have heard of you.”
The man seemed staggered for a moment, and then, with a cry of anger, he leaped upon her.
“What is your game?” he hissed, as he shook her savagely. “What are you up to? I thought you a soft, innocent little girl, and now you are showing yourself something quite different. I believe you played me for a sucker! And you want a divorce! Well, here is cause for it!”
Then he choked her.
Frank went at him like a cyclone.
“You infernal villain!” he cried, as his hands fell on the man, and he tore the gasping girl from his clutches. “No one but a brute ever lays hands on a woman in anger, and a brute deserves a good drubbing almost any time. Here is where you get it!”
Then he proceeded to polish off the girl’s assailant in a most scientific manner, ending by flinging him in a limp and battered condition into a corner of the room.
Diamond had hastened to support the girl when Frank snatched her from her assailant, but she repulsed him and flung him off, saying, hoarsely:
“Let me alone! I am all right! I want to see this fight!”