So Mr. Merry went amok, in the exact meaning of that word.
They were aware of him the moment he entered the main shed. They saw him, and they started at him with a yell.
He was the same man they chased and worried—that helpless and harmless outcast—just before. But so it is with all such outcasts: always helpless and harmless—just before. Heaven had fashioned Mr. Merry in one image, but the climatic devil had finished him in quite another. Most of his few rags had been torn from him, he was swathed about the middle with a Malay sarong, and his lean body was scored and pulped with blows. But his face was mottled and bluish now, with a fleck of foam in his beard. And when he came in among them he neither paused nor turned aside.
He made one jump to Zimballo's zinc bar. He made one leap to the highboy, Zimballo's high altar. He swept into his arms half a dozen of multicolored bottles, and, looming there above them from the top of the bar—up among the lights and the swaying punkahs—he began to launch those juggling missiles right and left, with the utmost speed and precision....
The first one caught Zimballo full in the chest and knocked him back against the wall with the shock of a battering ram. Another crashed just over his head as he sank to the floor. The engineer was sprawling at the billiard table when a third exploded like a shell fairly in front and deluged him in a flood of sticky liquor. The loafers and the clerk turned to run. But Merry dealt with them—and with retribution.
He was doing the thing he best knew how to do, by virtue of the odd knack of his fingers—and this time he made no mistakes.
He emptied a shelf, and the next, and the bottles still flew from him, streaking through space, smashing among the enemy.
Most of them made a miserable escape one way or another and fled, carrying a voice of panic that cleared out the establishment from end to end front and rear. But not Silva. Not the yellow-faced captain, who came back from the back of the room and charged with uplifted cue, snarling—who was met halfway: stopped, overwhelmed and crushed in his tracks as by a hail of thunderbolts....