by his hand; yet, by a sheer abrupt jerk, he took the
saloon-keeper off his feet and flung him face downward in the snow. In
quick succession, seizing the men nearest him, he threw half a dozen
more. Resistance was useless. They flew helter-skelter out of his
grips, landing in all manner of attitudes, grotesquely and harmlessly,
in the soft snow. It soon became difficult, in the dim starlight, to
distinguish between those thrown and those waiting their turn, and he
began feeling their backs and shoulders, determining their status by
whether or not he found them powdered with snow.

"Baptized yet?" became his stereotyped question, as he reached out his
terrible hands.

Several score lay down in the snow in a long row, while many others
knelt in mock humility, scooping snow upon their heads and claiming the
rite accomplished. But a group of five stood upright, backwoodsmen and
frontiersmen, they, eager to contest any man's birthday.

Graduates of the hardest of man-handling schools, veterans of
multitudes of rough-and-tumble battles, men of blood and sweat and
endurance, they nevertheless lacked one thing that Daylight possessed
in high degree--namely, an almost perfect brain and muscular
coordination. It was simple, in its way, and no virtue of his. He had
been born with this endowment. His nerves carried messages more
quickly than theirs; his mental processes, culminating in acts of will,
were quicker than theirs; his muscles themselves, by some immediacy of
chemistry, obeyed the messages of his will quicker than theirs. He was
so made, his muscles were high-power explosives. The levers of his
body snapped into play like the jaws of steel traps. And in addition
to all this, his was that super-strength that is the dower of but one
human in millions--a strength depending not on size but on degree, a
supreme organic excellence residing in the stuff of the muscles
themselves. Thus, so swiftly could he apply a stress, that, before an
opponent could become aware and resist, the aim of the stress had been
accomplished. In turn, so swiftly did he become aware of a stress
applied to him, that he saved himself by resistance or by delivering a
lightning counter-stress.

"It ain't no use you-all standing there," Daylight addressed the
waiting group. "You-all might as well get right down and take your
baptizing. You-all might down me any other day in the year, but on my
birthday I want you-all to know I'm the bes