The voice rang out with sharp anxiety, and pierced the fog of passion and rage in which O’Ryan was moving. He realized what he was doing, the real sense of it came upon him. Suddenly he let go the lank throat of his enemy, and, by a supreme effort, flung him across the stage, where Jopp lay resting on his hands, his bleared eyes looking at Terry with the fear and horror still in them which had come with that tightening grip on his throat.
Silence fell suddenly on the theatre. The audience was standing. A woman sobbed somewhere in a far corner, but the rest were dismayed and speechless. A few steps before them all was Molly Mackinder, white and frightened, but in her eyes was a look of understanding as she gazed at Terry. Breathing hard, Terry stood still in the middle of the stage, the red fog not yet gone out of his eyes, his hands clasped at his side, vaguely realizing the audience again. Behind him was the back curtain, in which the lights of Orion twinkled aggressively. The three men who had attacked him were still where he had thrown them.
The silence was intense, the strain oppressive. But now a drawling voice came from the back of the hall.
“Are you watching the rise of Orion?” it said. It was the voice of Gow Johnson.
The strain was broken; the audience dissolved in laughter; but it was not hilarious; it was the nervous laughter of relief, touched off by a native humor always present in the dweller of the prairie.
“I beg your pardon,” said Terry, quietly and abstractedly, to the audience.
And the scene-shifter bethought himself and let down the curtain.
The fourth act was not played that night. The people had had more than the worth of their money. In a few moments the stage was crowded with people from the audience, but both Jopp and O’Ryan had disappeared.
Among the visitors to the stage was Molly Mackinder. There was a meaning smile upon her face as she said to Dicky Fergus:
“It was quite wonderful, wasn’t it—like a scene out of the classics—the gladiators or something?”