The vicious brutality of the attack following so trivial an offense aroused Bill Carmody's anger. The man's back was toward him, and Bill grasped the back-drawn arm at the wrist and with an ungentle jerk whirled the other in his tracks.
The man released the flunky and faced him with a snarl. "Who done that?" he roared.
"I did. Hit me. I tripped him."
Bill's voice was dead level and low, but it carried to the farthest reaches of the room, over which had fallen a silence of expectation. Men saw that the hard gray eyes of the stranger narrowed ominously.
"An' who the hell are you?" The words whistled through the bared teeth and a flush of fury flooded the man's face.
"What do you care? I tripped him. Hit me!" and the low, level tone blended into silence. It seemed a thing—that uncanny silence when noise should have been.
There were sounds—sounds that no one heeded nor heard—the heavy breathing of a hundred men waiting for something to happen—the thin creak of the table boards as men leaned forward upon hands whose knuckles whitened under the red skin, and stared, fascinated, at the two big men who faced each other in the broad aisle.
The swinish eyes of the brutish man glared malignantly into the gray eyes of the stranger, in which there appeared no slightest flicker of rage nor hate, nor any other emotion.
Only a cold, hard stare which held something of terrible intensity, accentuated by the little fans of whitening wrinkles which radiated from their corners.
In that instant the other's gaze wavered. He knew that this man had lied; and he knew that every man in the room knew that he had lied. That he had deliberately lied into the row and then, without raising his guard, had dared him to strike.