“For God’s sake, hold up, Doc, will you?” shouted the harness-maker.  “You don’t want to kill him, do you?”

Mrs. Ryer and Heise’s lame wife were filling the air with their outcries.  Selina was giggling with hysteria.  Marcus, terrified, but too brave to run, had picked up a jagged stone with his left hand and stood on the defensive.  His swollen right arm, from which the shirt sleeve had been torn, dangled at his side, the back of the hand twisted where the palm should have been.  The shirt itself was a mass of grass stains and was spotted with the dentist’s blood.

But McTeague, in the centre of the group that struggled to hold him, was nigh to madness.  The side of his face, his neck, and all the shoulder and breast of his shirt were covered with blood.  He had ceased to cry out, but kept muttering between his gripped jaws, as he labored to tear himself free of the retaining hands: 

“Ah, I’ll kill him!  Ah, I’ll kill him!  I’ll kill him!  Damn you, Heise,” he exclaimed suddenly, trying to strike the harness-maker, “let go of me, will you!”

Little by little they pacified him, or rather (for he paid but little attention to what was said to him) his bestial fury lapsed by degrees.  He turned away and let fall his arms, drawing long breaths, and looking stupidly about him, now searching helplessly upon the ground, now gazing vaguely into the circle of faces about him.  His ear bled as though it would never stop.

“Say, Doctor,” asked Heise, “what’s the best thing to do?”

“Huh?” answered McTeague.  “What—­what do you mean?  What is it?”

“What’ll we do to stop this bleeding here?”

McTeague did not answer, but looked intently at the blood-stained bosom of his shirt.

“Mac,” cried Trina, her face close to his, “tell us something—­the best thing we can do to stop your ear bleeding.”

“Collodium,” said the dentist.

“But we can’t get to that right away; we—­”

“There’s some ice in our lunch basket,” broke in Heise.  “We brought it for the beer; and take the napkins and make a bandage.”

“Ice,” muttered the dentist, “sure, ice, that’s the word.”

Mrs. Heise and the Ryers were looking after Marcus’s broken arm.  Selina sat on the slope of the grass, gasping and sobbing.  Trina tore the napkins into strips, and, crushing some of the ice, made a bandage for her husband’s head.’

The party resolved itself into two groups; the Ryers and Mrs. Heise bending over Marcus, while the harness-maker and Trina came and went about McTeague, sitting on the ground, his shirt, a mere blur of red and white, detaching itself violently from the background of pale-green grass.  Between the two groups was the torn and trampled bit of turf, the wrestling ring; the picnic baskets, together with empty beer bottles, broken egg-shells, and discarded sardine tins, were scattered here and there.  In the middle of the improvised wrestling ring the sleeve of Marcus’s shirt fluttered occasionally in the sea breeze.