McNamara continued his calm discourse till he received a vicious whack on the shoulder; then he turned for a moment to interrupt his assailant’s garrulous profanity:
“Don’t bother me. I am engaged.”
“Ye won’ talk to me, eh? Well, I’m goin’ to talk to you, see? I guess you’d listen if I told these people all I know about you. Turn around here.”
His voice was menacing and attracted general notice. Observing this, McNamara addressed him, his words dropping clear, concise, and cold:
“Don’t talk to me. You are a drunken nuisance. Go away before something happens to you.”
Again he turned away, but the drunken man seized and whirled him about, repeating his abuse, encouraged by this apparent patience.
“Your pardon for an instant, gentlemen.” McNamara laid a large white and manicured hand upon the flannel sleeve of the miner and gently escorted him through the entrance to the sidewalk, while the crowd smiled.
As they cleared the threshold, however, he clenched his fist without a word and, raising it, struck the sot fully and cruelly upon the jaw. His victim fell silently, the back of his head striking the boards with a hollow thump; then, without even observing how he lay, McNamara re-entered the saloon and took up his conversation where he had been interrupted. His voice was as evenly regulated as his movements, betraying not a sign of anger, excitement, or bravado. He lit a cigarette, extracted a note-book, and jotted down certain memoranda supplied him by Mexico Mullins.
All this time the body lay across the threshold without a sign of life. The buzz of the roulette-wheel was resumed and the crap-dealer began his monotonous routine. Every eye was fixed on the nonchalant man at the bar, but the unconscious creature outside the threshold lay unheeded, for in these men’s code it behooves the most humane to practise a certain aloofness in the matter of private brawls.
Having completed his notes, McNamara shook hands gravely with his companions and strode out through the door, past the bulk that sprawled across his path, and, without pause or glance, disappeared.