Sheridan stood looking at him fixedly.  “What ‘fighting?’”

“Yours—­with nature.”  Gurney sustained the daunting gaze of his fierce antagonist equably.  “You don’t seem to understand that you’ve been struggling against actual law.”

“What law?”

“Natural law,” said Gurney.  “What do you think beat you with Edith?  Did Edith, herself, beat you?  Didn’t she obey without question something powerful that was against you?  Edith wasn’t against you, and you weren’t against her, but you set yourself against the power that had her in its grip, and it shot out a spurt of flame—­and won in a walk!  What’s taken Roscoe from you?  Timbers bear just so much strain, old man; but you wanted to send the load across the broken bridge, and you thought you could bully or coax the cracked thing into standing.  Well, you couldn’t!  Now here’s Bibbs.  There are thousands of men fit for the life you want him to lead—­and so is he.  It wouldn’t take half of Bibbs’s brains to be twice as good a business man as Jim and Roscoe put together.”

“What!” Sheridan goggled at him like a zany.

“Your son Bibbs,” said the doctor, composedly, “Bibbs Sheridan has the kind and quantity of ‘gray matter’ that will make him a success in anything—­if he ever wakes up!  Personally I should prefer him to remain asleep.  I like him that way.  But the thousands of men fit for the life you want him to lead aren’t fit to do much with the life he ought to lead.  Blindly, he’s been fighting for the chance to lead it—­he’s obeying something that begs to stay alive within him; and, blindly, he knows you’ll crush it out.  You’ve set your will to do it.  Let me tell you something more.  You don’t know what you’ve become since Jim’s going thwarted you—­and that’s what was uppermost, a bafflement stronger than your normal grief.  You’re half mad with a consuming fury against the very self of the law—­for it was the very self of the law that took Jim from you.  That was a law concerning the cohesion of molecules.  The very self of the law took Roscoe from you and gave Edith the certainty of beating you; and the very self of the law makes Bibbs deny you to-night.  The law beats you.  Haven’t you been whipped enough?  But you want to whip the law—­you’ve set yourself against it, to bend it to your own ends, to wield it and twist it—­”

The voice broke from Sheridan’s heaving chest in a shout.  “Yes!  And by God, I will!”

“So Ajax defied the lightning,” said Gurney.

“I’ve heard that dam’-fool story, too,” Sheridan retorted, fiercely.  “That’s for chuldern and niggers.  It ain’t twentieth century, let me tell you!  ‘Defied the lightning,’ did he, the jackass!  If he’d been half a man he’d ‘a’ got away with it.  We don’t go showin’ off defyin’ the lightning—­we hitch it up and make it work for us like a black-steer!  A man nowadays would just as soon think o’ defyin’ a wood-shed!”