This man was trying to injure him.  Either the kick or the gouge would have left him maimed for life.  A sudden fierce desire to beat his opponent into the earth seized Bob.  With a single effort he wrenched his arms free.

Now this fact has been noted again and again:  mere size has often little to do with a man’s physical prowess.  The list of anecdotes wherein the little fellow “puts it all over” the big bully is exceptionally long.  Nor are more than a bare majority of the anecdotes baseless.  In our own lumber woods a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound man with no other weapon than his two hands once nearly killed a two-hundred-pound blacksmith for pushing him off a bench.  This phenomenon arises from the fact that the little man seems capable often of releasing at will a greater flood of dynamic energy than a big man.  We express this by saying that it is the spirit that counts.  As a matter of truth the big man may have as much courage as the little man.  It is simply that he cannot, at will, tap as quickly the vast reservoir of nervous energy that lies beneath all human effort of any kind whatsoever.  He cannot arouse himself as can the little man.

It was for the foregoing reason that Roaring Dick had acquired his ascendancy.  He possessed the temperament that fuses.  When he fought, he fought with the ferocity and concentration of a wild beast.  This concentration, this power of fusing to white heat all the powers of a man’s being down to the uttermost, this instinctive ability to tap the extra-human stores of dynamics is what constitutes the temperament of genius, whether it be applied to invention, to artistic creation, to ruling, to finance, or merely to beating down personal opposition by beating in the opponent’s face.  Unfortunately for him, Bob Orde happened also to possess the temperament of genius.  The two foul blows aroused him.  All at once he became blind to everything but an unreasoning desire to hurt this man who had tried to hurt him.  On the side of dynamics the combat suddenly equalized.  It became a question merely of relative power, and Bob was the bigger man.

Bob threw his man from him by main strength.  Roaring Dick staggered back, only to carrom against a tree.  A dozen swift, straight blows in the face drove him by the sheer force of them.  He was smothered, overwhelmed, by the young man’s superior size.  Bob fell upon him savagely.  In less than a minute the fight was over as far as Roaring Dick was concerned.  Blinded, utterly winded, his whiskey-driven energies drained away, he fell like a log.  Bob, still blazing, found himself without an opponent.

He glared about him.  The rivermen were gathered in a silent ring.  Just beyond stood a side-bar buggy in which a burly, sodden red-faced man stood up the better to see.  Bob recognized him as one of the saloon keepers at Twin Falls, and his white-hot brain jumped to the correct conclusion that Roaring Dick, driven by some vague conscience-stirring in regard to his work, had insisted on going down river; and that this dive-keeper, loth to lose a profitable customer in the dull season, had offered transportation in the hopeful probability that he could induce the riverman to return with him.  Bob stooped, lifted his unconscious opponent, strode to the side-bar buggy and unceremoniously dumped his burden therein.