The crowd parted.  Out of the pack a pair of strong arms and lean broad shoulders ploughed a way for a somewhat damaged face that still carried a debonair smile.  With pantherish litheness the Arizonan ducked a swinging blow.  The rippling muscles of the plunging shoulders tossed aside a little man in evening dress clawing at him.  Yet a moment, and he was outside taking the three steps that led to the street.

Into his laboring lungs he drew deliciously the soft breath of the night.  It cooled the fever of his hammered face, was like an icy bath to his hot body.  A little dizzy from the blows that had been rained on him, he stood for a moment uncertain which way to go.  From his throat there rippled a low peal of joyous mirth.  The youth in him delighted in the free-for-all from which he had just emerged.

Then again he became aware of Durand.  The man was not alone.  He had with him a hulking ruffian whose heavy, hunched shoulders told of strength.  There was a hint of the gorilla in the way the long arms hung straight from the shoulders as he leaned forward.  Both of the men were watching the cowpuncher as steadily as alley cats do a housefinch.

“Hell’s going to pop in about three seconds,” announced Clay to himself.

Silently, without lifting their eyes from their victim for an instant, the two men moved apart to take him on both sides.  He clung to the wall, forcing a frontal attack.  The laughter had gone out of his eyes now.  They had hardened to pinpoints.  This time it was no amateur horseplay.  He was fighting for his life.  No need to tell Clay Lindsay that the New York gangster meant to leave him as good as dead.

The men rushed him.  He fought them back with clean hard blows.  Jerry bored in like a wild bull.  Clay caught him off his balance, using a short arm jolt which had back of it all that twenty-three years of clean outdoors Arizona could give.  The gangster hit the pavement hard.

He got up furious and charged again.  The Arizonan, busy with the other man, tried to sidestep.  An uppercut jarred him to the heel.  In that instant of time before his knees began to sag beneath him his brain flashed the news that Durand had struck him on the chin with brass knucks.  He crumpled up and went down, still alive to what was going on, but unable to move in his own defense.  Weakly he tried to protect his face and sides from the kicks of a heavy boot.  Then he floated balloon-like in space and vanished into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER VIII

“THE BEST SINGLE-BARRELED SPORT IVER I MET”

Clay drifted back to a world in which the machinery of his body creaked.  He turned his head, and a racking pain shot down his neck.  He moved a leg, and every muscle in it ached.  From head to foot he was sore.

Voices somewhere in space, detached from any personal ownership, floated vaguely to him.  Presently these resolved themselves into words and sentences.