His right arm flung Barney backward so that Barney went staggering
over himself and sprawled upon the floor. Joe gripped Old Jimmie's
collar, and his right hand painfully twisted Jimmie's arm. "And I
finish you off first, Jimmie Carlisle, for what you've done to me and
my girl! But for Larry Brainard you, Jimmie Carlisle, would have
succeeded in your scheme to make my girl a crook! I'd like to give you
a thousand years of agony, you damned rat--but that's beyond me!" His
right hand shifted swiftly from Old Jimmie's arm to his throat. "But
I'm going to choke your rat's life out of you!--your lying, sneaking
devil's life out of you!"
Old Jimmie squirmed and twisted with those long fingers clamped
mercilessly around his throat, his eyes rolling, and his mouth gaping
with voiceless cries. He was indeed being shaken as a rat might be
shaken.
"Don't!--Don't!" cried the frantic Maggie, and started to seize her
father to pull him away. But she was halted by her arm being caught by
Barney.
"Let Jimmie have it!" he said fiercely to her, and flung her to the
farthest corner of the room. And grimly exultant over what seemed to
be Old Jimmie's doom, he started for the door to make his own escape.
Up to the moment of Joe Ellison's eruption Larry had felt bound to
remain a mere spectator where he was: long as the time had seemed to
him, it had in fact been less than half an hour.
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