Yet he did not once attempt to strike a solid blow, nothing but that humiliating, open-handed slap, that dexterous swing of his foot that plunged Monohan headlong.  He grinned steadily, a cold grimace that reflected no mirth, being merely a sneering twist of his features.  Stella knew the deadly strength of him.  She wondered at his purpose, how it would end.

The elusive light-footedness of the man, the successive stinging of those contemptuous slaps at last maddened Monohan into ignoring the rules by which men fight.  He dropped his hands and stood panting with his exertions.  Suddenly he kicked, a swift lunge for Fyfe’s body.

Fyfe leaped aside.  Then he closed.  Powerful and weighty a man as Monohan was, Fyfe drove him halfway around with a short-arm blow that landed near his heart, and while he staggered from that, clamped one thick arm about his neck in the strangle-hold.  Holding him helpless, bent backwards across his broad chest, Fyfe slowly and systematically choked him; he shut off his breath until Monohan’s tongue protruded, and his eyes bulged glassily, and horrible, gurgling noises issued from his gaping mouth.

“Jack, Jack!” Stella found voice to shriek.  “You’re killing him.”

Fyfe lifted his eyes to hers.  The horror he saw there may have stirred him.  Or he may have considered his object accomplished.  Stella could not tell.  But he flung Monohan from him with a force that sent him reeling a dozen feet, to collapse on the moss.  It took him a full minute to regain his breath, to rise to unsteady feet, to find his voice.

“You can’t win all the time,” he gasped.  “By God, I’ll show you that you can’t.”

With that he turned and went back the way he had come.  Fyfe stood silent, hands resting on his hips, watching until Monohan pushed out a slim speed launch from under cover of overhanging alders and set off down the lake.

“Well,” he remarked then, in a curiously detached, impersonal tone.  “The lightning will begin to play by and by, I suppose.”

“What do you mean?” Stella asked breathlessly.

He did not answer.  His eyes turned to her slowly.  She saw now that his face was white and rigid, that the line of his lips drew harder together as he looked at her; but she was not prepared for the storm that broke.  She did not comprehend the tempest that raged within him until he had her by the shoulders, his fingers crushing into her soft flesh like the jaws of a trap, shaking her as a terrier might shake a rat, till the heavy coils of hair cascaded over her shoulders, and for a second fear tugged at her heart.  For she thought he meant to kill her.

When he did desist, he released her with a thrust of his arms that sent her staggering against a tree, shaken to the roots of her being, though not with fear.  Anger had displaced that.  A hot protest against his brute strength, against his passionate outbreak, stirred her.  Appearances were against her, she knew.  Even so, she revolted against his cave-man roughness.  She was amazed to find herself longing for the power to strike him.