“What did I say to you yesterday?” Fyfe opened his mouth at last.  “But then I might have known I was wasting my breath on you!”

“Well,” Monohan retorted insolently, “what are you going to do about it?  This isn’t the Stone Age.”

Fyfe laughed unpleasantly.

“Lucky for you.  You’d have been eliminated long ago,” he said.  “No, it takes the present age to produce such rotten specimens as you.”

A deep flush rose in Monohan’s cheeks.  He took a step toward Fyfe, his hands clenched.

“You wouldn’t say that if you weren’t armed,” he taunted hoarsely.

“No?” Fyfe cast the rifle to one side.  It fell with a metallic clink against a stone.  “I do say it though, you see.  You are a sort of a yellow dog, Monohan.  You know it, and you know that I know it.  That’s why it stings you to be told so.”

Monohan stepped back and slipped out of his coat.  His face was crimson.

“By God, I’ll teach you something,” he snarled.

He lunged forward as he spoke, shooting a straight-arm blow for Fyfe’s face.  It swept through empty air, for Fyfe, poised on the balls of his feet, ducked under the driving fist, and slapped Monohan across the mouth with the open palm of his hand.

“Tag,” he said sardonically.  “You’re It.”

Monohan pivoted, and rushing, swung right and left, missing by inches.  Fyfe’s mocking grin seemed to madden him completely.  He rushed again, launching another vicious blow that threw him partly off his balance.  Before he could recover, Fyfe kicked both feet from under him, sent him sprawling on the moss.

Stella stood like one stricken.  The very thing she dreaded had come about.  Yet the manner of its unfolding was not as she had visualized it when she saw Fyfe near at hand.  She saw now a side of her husband that she had never glimpsed, that she found hard to understand.  She could have understood him beating Monohan senseless, if he could.  A murderous fury of jealousy would not have surprised her.  This did.  He had not struck a blow, did not attempt to strike.

She could not guess why, but she saw that he was playing with Monohan, making a fool of him, for all Monohan’s advantage of height and reach.  Fyfe moved like the light, always beyond Monohan’s vengeful blows, slipping under those driving fists to slap his adversary, to trip him, mocking him with the futility of his effort.

She felt herself powerless to stop that sorry exhibition.  It was not a fight for her.  Dimly she had a feeling that back of her lay something else.  An echo of it had been more than once in Fyfe’s speech.  Here and now, they had forgotten her at the first word.  They were engaged in a struggle for mastery, sheer brute determination to hurt each other, which had little or nothing to do with her.  She foresaw, watching the odd combat with a feeling akin to fascination, that it was a losing game for Monohan.  Fyfe was his master at every move.