In his time O'Ryan had speculated, and lost; he had floated a coal-mine, and "been had"; he had run for the local legislature, had been elected, and then unseated for bribery committed by an agent; he had run races at Regina, and won--he had won for three years in succession; and this had kept him going and restored his finances when they were at their worst. He was, in truth, the best rider in the country, and, so far, was the owner also of the best three-year-old that the West had produced. He achieved popularity without effort. The West laughed at his enterprises and loved him; he was at once a public moral and a hero. It was a legend of the West that his forebears had been kings in Ireland like Brian Boroihme. He did not contradict this; he never contradicted anything. His challenge to all fun and satire and misrepresentation was, "What'll be the differ a hundred years from now!"

He did not use this phrase, however, toward one experience--the advent of Miss Molly Mackinder, the heiress, and the challenge that reverberated through the West after her arrival. Philosophy deserted him then; he fell back on the primary emotions of mankind.

A month after Miss Mackinder's arrival at La Touche a dramatic performance was given at the old fort, in which the officers of the Mounted Police took part, together with many civilians who fancied themselves. By that time the district had realized that Terry O'Ryan had surrendered to what they called "the laying on of hands" by Molly Mackinder. It was not certain, however, that the surrender was complete, because O'Ryan had been wounded before, and yet had not been taken captive altogether. His complete surrender seemed now more certain to the public because the lady had a fortune of two hundred thousand dollars, and that amount of money would be useful to an ambitious man in the growing West. It would, as Gow Johnson said, "Let him sit back and view the landscape o'er before he puts his ploughshare in the mud."

There was an out-door scene in the play produced by the impetuous amateurs, and dialogue had been interpolated by three "imps of fame" at the suggestion of Constantine Jopp, one of the three, who bore malice toward O'Ryan, though this his colleagues did not know distinctly. The scene was a camp-fire--a starlit night, a colloquy between the three, upon which the hero of the drama, played by Terry O'Ryan, should break, after having, unknown to them, but in sight of the audience, overheard their kind intentions toward himself.

The night came. When the curtain rose for the third act there was exposed a star-sown sky, in which the galaxy of Orion was shown with distinctness, each star sharply twinkling from the electric power behind--a pretty scene, evoking great applause. O'Ryan had never seen this back curtain--they had taken care that he should not--and, standing in the wings awaiting his cue, he was unprepared for the laughter of the audience, first low and uncertain, then growing, then insistent, and now a peal of ungovernable mirth, as one by one they understood the significance of the stars of Orion on the back curtain.

O'Ryan got his cue, and came on to an outburst of applause which shook the walls. La Touche rose at him, among them Miss Molly Mackinder in the front row with the notables.

He did not see the back curtain, or Orion blazing in the ultramarine blue.

According to the stage directions, he was to steal along the trees at the wings, and listen to the talk of the men at the fire plotting against him, who were presently to pretend good comradeship to his face. It was a vigorous melodrama, with some touches of true Western feeling. After listening for a moment, O'Ryan was to creep up the stage again toward the back curtain, giving a cue for his appearance.

When the hilarious applause at his entrance had somewhat subsided, the three took up their parable, but it was not the parable of the play. They used dialogue not in the original. It had a significance which the audience were not slow to appreciate, and went far to turn _The Sunburst Trail_ at this point into a comedy-farce. When this new dialogue began, O'Ryan could scarcely trust his ears or realize what was happening.

"Ah, look," said d.i.c.ky Fergus at the fire, "as fine a night as I ever saw in the West! The sky's a picture. You could almost hand the stars down, they're so near."

"What's that clump together on the right--what are they called in astronomy?" asked Constantine Jopp, with a leer.

"Orion is the name--a beauty, ain't it?" answered Fergus.

"I've been watching Orion rise," said the third--Holden was his name.

"Many's the time I've watched Orion rising. Orion's the star for me. Say, he wipes 'em all out--right out. Watch him rising now."

By a manipulation of the lights Orion moved up the back curtain slowly and blazed with light nearer the zenith. And La Touche had more than the worth of its money in this opening to the third act of the play. O'Ryan was a favorite, at whom La Touche loved to jeer, and the parable of the stars convulsed them.

At the first words O'Ryan put a hand on himself and tried to grasp the meaning of it all, but his entrance and the subsequent applause had confused him. Presently, however, he turned to the back curtain, as Orion moved slowly up the heavens, and found the key to the situation. He gasped. Then he listened to the dialogue, which had nothing to do with "_The Sunburst Trail_."

"What did Orion do, and why does he rise? Has he got to rise? Why was the gent called Orion in them far-off days?" asked Holden.

"He did some hunting in his time--with a club," Fergus replied. "He kept making hits, he did. Orion was a spoiler. When he took the field there was no room for the rest of the race. Why does he rise? Because it is a habit.

They could always get a rise out of Orion. The Athens _Eirenicon_ said that yeast might fail to rise, but touch the b.u.t.ton and Orion would rise like a bird."

At that instant the galaxy jerked up the back curtain again, and, when the audience could control itself, Constantine Jopp, grinning meanly, asked:

"Why does he wear the girdle?"

"It is not a girdle--it is a belt," was d.i.c.ky Fergus' reply. "The G.o.ds gave it to him because he was a favorite. There was a lady called Artemis--she was the last of them. But he went visiting with Eos, another lady of previous acquaintance, down at a place called Ortygia, and Artemis shot him dead with a shaft Apollo had given her; but she didn't marry Apollo neither. She laid Orion out on the sky, with his glittering belt around him. And Orion keeps on rising."

"Will he ever stop rising?" asked Holden.

Followed for the conspirators a disconcerting moment; for, when the laughter had subsided, a lazy voice came from the back of the hall, "He'll stop long enough to play with Apollo a little, I guess."

It was Gow Johnson who had spoken, and no man knew Terry O'Ryan better, or could gauge more truly the course he would take. He had been in many an enterprise, many a brush with O'Ryan, and his friendship would bear any strain.

O'Ryan recovered himself from the moment he saw the back curtain, and he did not find any fun in the thing. It took a hold on him out of all proportion to its importance. He realized that he had come to the parting of the ways in his life. It suddenly came upon him that something had been lacking in him in the past, and that his want of success in many things had not been wholly due to bad luck. He had been eager, enterprising, a genius almost at seeing good things; and yet others had reaped where he had sown. He had believed too much in his fellow-man. For the first time in his life he resented the friendly, almost affectionate satire of his many friends. It was amusing, it was delightful; but down beneath it all there was a little touch of ridicule. He had more brains than any of them, and he had known it in a way; he had led them sometimes, too, as on raids against cattle-stealers, and in a brush with half-breeds and Indians; as when he stood for the legislature; but he felt now for the first time that he had not made the most of himself, that there was something hurting to self-respect in this prank played upon him. When he came to that point his resentment went higher. He thought of Molly Mackinder, and he heard all too acutely the vague veiled references to her in their satire. By the time Gow Johnson spoke he had mastered himself, however, and had made up his mind. He stood still for a moment.

"Now, please, my cue," he said, quietly and satirically from the trees near the wings.

He was smiling, but Gow Johnson's prognostication was right; and ere long the audience realized that he was right. There was standing before them not the Terry O'Ryan they had known, but another. He threw himself fully into his part--a young rancher made deputy-sheriff, who by the occasional exercise of his duty had incurred the hatred of a small floating population that lived by fraud, violence, and cattle-stealing. The conspiracy was to raid his cattle, to lure him to pursuit, to ambush him, and kill him. Terry now played the part with a naturalness and force which soon lifted the play away from the farcical element introduced into it by those who had interpolated the gibes at himself. They had gone a step too far.

"He's going large," said Gow Johnson, as the act drew near its close and the climax neared where O'Ryan was to enter upon a physical struggle with his a.s.sailants. "His blood's up. There'll be h.e.l.l to pay."

To Gow Johnson the play had instantly become real, and O'Ryan an injured man at bay, the victim of the act--not of the fict.i.tious characters of the play, but of the three men, Fergus, Holden, and Constantine Jopp, who had planned the discomfiture of O'Ryan; and he felt that the victim's resentment would fall heaviest on Constantine Jopp, the bully, an old schoolmate of Terry's.

Jopp was older than O'Ryan by three years, which in men is little, but in boys, at a certain time of life, is much. It means, generally, weight and height, an advantage in a scrimmage. Constantine Jopp had been the plague and tyrant of O'Ryan's boyhood. He was now a big, leering fellow, with much money of his own, got chiefly from the coal discovered on his place by Vigon, the half-breed French-Canadian. He had a sense of dark and malicious humor, a long, horse-like face, with little, beady eyes, and a huge frame.

Again and again had Terry fought him as a boy at school, and often he had been badly whipped, but he had never refused the challenge of an insult when he was twelve and Jopp fifteen. The climax to their enmity at school had come one day when Terry was seized with a cramp while bathing, and after having gone down twice was rescued by Jopp, who dragged him out by the hair of the head. He had been restored to consciousness on the bank and carried to his home, where he lay ill for days. During the course of the slight fever which followed the accident his hair was cut close to his head. Impetuous always, his first thought was to go and thank Constantine Jopp for having saved his life. As soon as he was able he went forth to find his rescuer, and met him suddenly on turning a corner of the street.

Before he could stammer out the grat.i.tude that was in his heart, Jopp, eying him with a sneering smile, said, drawlingly:

"If you'd had your hair cut like that I couldn't have got you out, could I? Holy, what a sight! Next time I'll take you by the scruff, putty face--bah!"

That was enough for Terry. He had swallowed the insult, stuttered his thanks to the jeering laugh of the lank bully, and had gone home and cried in shame and rage.

It was the one real shadow in his life. Ill-luck and good luck had been taken with an equable mind; but the fact that he must, while he lived, own the supreme debt of his life to a boy and afterward to a man whom he hated by instinct was a constant cloud on him. Jopp owned him. For some years they did not meet, and then at last they again were thrown together in the West, when Jopp settled at La Touche. It was gall and wormwood to Terry, but he steeled himself to be friendly, although the man was as great a bully as the boy, as offensive in mind and character; but withal acute and able in his way, and with a reputation for commercial sharpness which would be called by another name in a different civilization. They met constantly, and O'Ryan always put a hand on himself, and forced himself to be friendly. Once when Jopp became desperately ill there had been--though he fought it down, and condemned himself in every term of reproach--a sense of relief in the thought that perhaps his ancient debt would now be cancelled. It had gone on so long. And Constantine Jopp had never lost an opportunity of vexing him, of turturing him, of giving veiled thrusts, which he knew O'Ryan could not resent. It was the constant pin-p.r.i.c.k of a mean soul, who had an advantage of which he could never be dispossessed--unless the ledger was balanced in some inscrutable way.

Apparently bent on amus.e.m.e.nt only, and hiding his hatred from his colleagues, Jopp had been the instigator and begetter of the huge joke of the play; but it was the brains of d.i.c.k Fergus which had carried it out, written the dialogue, and planned the electric appliances of the back curtain--for he was an engineer and electrician. Neither he nor Holden had known the old antipathy of Terry and Constantine Jopp. There was only one man who knew the whole truth, and that was Gow Johnson, to whom Terry had once told all. At the last moment Fergus had interpolated certain points in the dialogue which were not even included at rehearsal. These referred to Apollo. He had a shrewd notion that Jopp had an idea of marrying Molly Mackinder if he could, cousins though they were; and he was also aware that Jopp, knowing Molly's liking for Terry, had tried to poison her mind against him, through suggestive gossip about a little widow at Jansen, thirty miles away. He had in so far succeeded that, on the very day of the performance, Molly had declined to be driven home from the race-course by Terry, despite the fact that Terry had won the chief race and owned the only dog-cart in the West.

As the day went on, Fergus realized, as had Gow Johnson, that Jopp had raised a demon. The air was electric. The play was drawing near to its climax--an attempt to capture the deputy-sheriff, tie him to a tree, and leave him bound and gagged alone in the waste. There was a glitter in Terry's eyes, belying the lips which smiled in keeping with the character he presented. A look of harshness was stamped on his face, and the outlines of the temples were as sharp as the chin was set and the voice slow and penetrating.

Molly Mackinder's eyes were riveted on him. She sat very still, her hands clasped in her lap, watching his every move. Instinct told her that Terry was holding himself in; that some latent fierceness and iron force in him had emerged into life; and that he meant to have revenge on Constantine Jopp one way or another, and that soon; for she had heard the rumor flying through the hall that her cousin was the cause of the practical joke just played. From hints she had had from Constantine that very day she knew that the rumor was the truth; and she recalled now with shrinking dislike the grimace accompanying the suggestion. She had not resented it then, being herself angry with Terry because of the little widow at Jansen.

Presently the silence in the hall became acute; the senses of the audience were strained to the utmost. The acting before them was more realistic than anything they had ever seen, or were ever likely to see again in La Touche. All three conspirators, Fergus, Holden, and Jopp, realized that O'Ryan's acting had behind it an animal anger which transformed him. When he looked into their eyes it was with a steely directness harder and fiercer than was observed by the audience. Once there was an occasion for O'Ryan to catch Fergus by the arm, and Fergus winced from the grip. When standing in the wings with Terry he ventured to apologize playfully for the joke, but Terry made no answer; and once again he had whispered good-naturedly as they stood together on the stage; but the reply had been a low, scornful laugh. Fergus realized that a critical moment was at hand.

The play provided for some dialogue between Jopp and Terry, and he observed with anxiety that Terry now interpolated certain phrases meant to warn Constantine, and to excite him to anger also.

The moment came upon them sooner than the text of the play warranted.

O'Ryan deliberately left out several sentences, and gave a later cue, and the struggle for his capture was precipitated. Terry meant to make the struggle real. So thrilling had been the scene that to an extent the audience was prepared for what followed; but they did not grasp the full reality--that the play was now only a vehicle for a personal issue of a desperate character. No one had ever seen O'Ryan angry; and now that the demon of rage was on him, directed by a will suddenly grown to its full height, they saw not only a powerful character in a powerful melodrama, but a man of wild force. When the three desperadoes closed in on O'Ryan, and, with a blow from the shoulder which was not a pretence, he sent Holden into a far corner gasping for breath and moaning with pain, the audience broke out into wild cheering. It was superb acting, they thought.

As most of them had never seen the play, they were not surprised when Holden did not again join the attack on the deputy-sheriff. Those who did know the drama--among them Molly Mackinder--became dismayed, then anxious.

Fergus and Jopp knew well from the blow O'Ryan had given that, unless they could drag him down, the end must be disaster to some one. They were struggling with him for personal safety now. The play was forgotten, though mechanically O'Ryan and Fergus repeated the exclamations and the few phrases belonging to the part. Jopp was silent, fighting with a malice which belongs to only half-breed, or half-bred, natures; and from far back in his own nature the distant Indian strain in him was working in savage hatred. The two were desperately hanging onto O'Ryan like pumas on a grizzly, when suddenly, with a twist he had learned from Ogami the j.a.p on the Smoky River, the slim Fergus was slung backward to the ground with the tendons of his arm strained and the arm itself useless for further work.

There remained now Constantine Jopp, heavier and more powerful than O'Ryan.

For O'Ryan the theatre, the people, disappeared. He was a boy again on the village-green, with the bully before him who had tortured his young days.

He forgot the old debt to the foe who saved his life; he forgot everything except that once again, as of old, Constantine Jopp was fighting him, with long, strong arms trying to bring him to the ground. Jopp's superior height gave him an advantage in a close grip; the strength of his gorilla-like arms was difficult to withstand. Both were forgetful of the world, and the two other injured men, silent and awed, were watching the fight, in which one of them, at least, was powerless to take part.

The audience was breathless. Most now saw the grim reality of the scene before them; and when at last O'Ryan's powerful right hand got a grip upon the throat of Jopp, and they saw the grip tighten, tighten, and Jopp's face go from red to purple, a hundred people gasped. Excited men made as though to move toward the stage; but the majority still believed that it all belonged to the play, and shouted, "Sit down!"

Suddenly the voice of Gow Johnson was heard: "Don't kill him--let go, boy!"

The voice rang out with sharp anxiety, and pierced the fog of pa.s.sion 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.