With an oath,—the first I ever heard him utter,—he cast the hammer from him, sending it clattering into a corner among the old horse shoes.
"Damn you,—I hate you and all your cursed aristocratic breed," he snarled. And, with the spring of a tiger, he had me by the throat, with those great, grabbing hands of his, his fingers closing cruelly on my windpipe as he tried to shake the life out of me.
I had always been able to account for Jim when it came to fisticuffs, but never at close quarters. This time, his attack was violent as it was unexpected. I did not have the ghost of a chance. I staggered back against the furnace wall, still in his devilish clutch. Not a gasp of air entered or left my body from the moment he clutched me.
He shook me as a terrier does a rat.
Soon my strength began to go; my eyes bulged; my head felt as if it were bursting; dancing lights and awful darknesses flashed and loomed alternately before and around me. Then the lights became scarcer and the darknesses longer and more intense. As the last glimmer of consciousness was leaving me, when black gloom had won and there was no more light, I felt a sudden release, painful and almost unwelcome to the oblivion to which I had been hurling. The lights came flashing back to me again and out of the whirling chaos I began to grasp the tangible once more. As I leaned against the side of the furnace, pulling at my throat where those terrible fingers had been,—gasping,—gasping,—for glorious life-giving, life-sustaining air, I gradually began to see as through a haze. Before long, I was almost myself again.
Jim was standing a few paces away, his chest heaving, his shaggy head bent and his great hands clenched against his thighs.
I gazed at him, and as I gazed something wet glistened in his eyes, rolled down his cheeks and splashed on the back of his hand, where it dried up as if it had fallen on a red-hot plate.
I took an unsteady step toward him and held out my hand.
"Jim," I murmured, "my poor old Jim!"
His head remained lowered.