“Why does he wear the girdle?”
“It is not a girdle—it is a belt,” was Dicky Fergus’s reply. “The gods gave it to him because he was a favourite. There was a lady called Artemis—she was the last of them. But he went visiting with Eos, another lady of previous acquaintance, down at a place called Ortygia, and Artemis shot him dead with a shaft Apollo had given her; but she didn’t marry Apollo neither. She laid Orion out on the sky, with his glittering belt, around him. And Orion keeps on rising.”
“Will he ever stop rising?” asked Holden.
Followed for the conspirators a disconcerting moment; for, when the laughter had subsided, a lazy voice came from the back of the hall, “He’ll stop long enough to play with Apollo a little, I guess.”
It was Gow Johnson who had spoken, and no man knew Terry O’Ryan better, or could gauge more truly the course he would take. He had been in many an enterprise, many a brush with O’Ryan, and his friendship would bear any strain.
O’Ryan recovered himself from the moment he saw the back curtain, and he did not find any fun in the thing. It took a hold on him out of all proportion to its importance. He realised that he had come to the parting of the ways in his life. It suddenly came upon him that something had been lacking in him in the past; and that his want of success in many things had not been wholly due to bad luck. He had been eager, enterprising, a genius almost at seeing good things; and yet others had reaped where he had sown. He had believed too much in his fellow-man. For the first time in his life he resented the friendly, almost affectionate satire of his many friends. It was amusing, it was delightful; but down beneath it all there was a little touch of ridicule. He had more brains than any of them, and he had known it in a way; he had led them sometimes, too, as on raids against cattle-stealers, and in a brush with half-breeds and Indians; as when he stood for the legislature; but he felt now for the first time that he had not made the most of himself, that there was something hurting to self-respect in this prank played upon him. When he came to that point his resentment went higher. He thought of Molly Mackinder, and he heard all too acutely the vague veiled references to her in their satire. By the time Gow Johnson spoke he had mastered himself, however, and had made up his mind. He stood still for a moment.
“Now, please, my cue,” he said quietly and satirically from the trees near the wings.
He was smiling, but Gow Johnson’s prognostication was right; and ere long the audience realised that he was right. There was standing before them not the Terry O’Ryan they had known, but another. He threw himself fully into his part—a young rancher made deputy sheriff, who by the occasional exercise of his duty had incurred the hatred of a small floating population that lived by fraud, violence, and cattle-stealing. The conspiracy was to raid his cattle, to lure him to pursuit, to ambush him, and kill him. Terry now played the part with a naturalness and force which soon lifted the play away from the farcical element introduced into it by those who had interpolated the gibes at himself. They had gone a step too far.
“He’s going large,” said Gow Johnson, as the act drew near its close, and the climax neared, where O’Ryan was to enter upon a physical struggle with his assailants. “His blood’s up. There’ll be hell to pay.”
To Gow Johnson the play had instantly become real, and O’Ryan an injured man at bay, the victim of the act—not of the fictitious characters of the play, but of the three men, Fergus, Holden, and Constantine Jopp, who had planned the discomfiture of O’Ryan; and he felt that the victim’s resentment would fall heaviest on Constantine Jopp, the bully, an old schoolmate of Terry’s.