But no one paid the slightest attention to her.  Forced by sheer odds of mass toward a corner, Ben’s long arms were working like flails.  Another man fell, and was up again.  The first one also was upon his feet now, his face white, and a tiny stream of blood trickling from his bruised jaw.  A heavy beer-bottle flung by one of the women crashed on the wall over the countryman’s head, the contents spattering over him like rain.  One of the men had seized a chair and swung it high, to strike, with murder in his eye.  Attracted by the confusion, the other occupants of the floor had rushed into the hall.  The door was flung open and instantly blocked with a mass of sinister menacing faces.

Until then, Ben had been silent as death, silent as one who realizes that he is fighting for life against overwhelming odds.  Now of a sudden he leaped backward like a great cat, clear of all the others.  From his throat there issued a sound, the like of which not one of those who listened had ever heard before, and which fairly lifted their hair—­the Indian war-whoop that the man had learned as a boy.  With the old instinctive motion, comparable in swiftness to nothing save the passage of light, the cowboy’s hands went to his hips, and as swiftly returned with the muzzles of two great revolvers protruding like elongated index fingers.  With equal swiftness, his face had undergone a transformation.  His jaw was set and his blue eyes flashed like live coals.

“Stand back, little folks!” he ordered, while the twin weapons revolved in circles of reflected flame about his trigger fingers.  “You seem to want a show, and you shall have it!” The whirling circles vanished.  A deep report fell upon the silence, and a gaudy vase on the mantle flew into a thousand pieces.  “Stand back, people, or you might get hurt!”

Awed into dumb helplessness, the spectators stared with widening eyes; but the spectacle had only begun.  Like the reports of giant fire-crackers, only seconds apart, the great revolvers spoke.  A nudely suggestive cast in the corner followed the vase.  A quaintly carved clock paused in its measure of time, its hands chronicling the minute of interruption.  A decanter of whiskey burst spattering over a table.  Two bacchanalian pictures on the wall suddenly had yawning wounds in their centre.  The portrait of a queen of the footlights leaped into the air.  One of the beer-bottles, which the madame had placed on a convenient table, popped as though it were champagne.  Fragments of glass and porcelain fell about like hail.  The place was lighted by a tuft of three big incandescent globes; and, last of all, one by one, they crashed into atoms, and the room was in total darkness.  Then silence fell, startling in contrast to the late confusion, while the pungent odor of burnt gunpowder intruded upon the nostrils.