it's
all I'm fit for."

Mr. Merry made never a sound.

For finally, with his wandering ended and with all questions of human
chemistry and racial difference aside--finally this white man had
reached the stage which had been so fully defined for him one steamy hot
day by a Dutch navigator at Palembang. He had gambled away his last
cent. He had been reduced to a wreck. His woman, in the laconic
phrase--"his woman had gone bad on him." He had no more use for anything
he could lay to mind. He was decidedly sorry with the world. And he was
utterly ready to die with a big smash....

So Mr. Merry went amok, in the exact meaning of that word.

* * * * *

They were aware of him the moment he entered the main shed. They saw
him, and they started at him with a yell.

He was the same man they chased and worried--that helpless and harmless
outcast--just before. But so it is with all such outcasts: always
helpless and harmless--just before. Heaven had fashioned Mr. Merry in
one image, but the climatic devil had finished him in quite another.
Most of his few rags had been torn from him, he was swathed about the
middle with a Malay sarong, and his lean body was scored and pulped with
blows. But his face was mottled and bluish now, with a fleck of foam in
his beard. And when he came in among them he neither paused nor turned
aside.

He made one jump to Zimballo's zinc bar. He made one leap to the
highboy, Zimballo's high altar. He swept into his arms half a dozen of
multicolored bottles, and, looming there above them from the top of the
bar--up among the lights and the swaying punkahs--he began to launch
those juggling missiles right and left, with the utmost speed and
precision....

The first one caught Zimballo full in the chest and knocked him back
against the wall with the shock of a battering ram. Another crashed just
over his head as he sank to the floor. The engineer was sprawling at the
billiard table when a third exploded like a shell fairly in front and
deluged him in a flood of sticky liquor. The loafers and the clerk
turned to run. But Merry dealt with them--and with retribution.

He was doing the thing he best knew how to do, by virtue of the odd
knack of his fingers--and this time he made no mistakes.

He emptied a shelf, and the next, and the bottles still flew from him,
streaking through space, smashing among the enemy.

Most of them made a miserable escape one way or another