"Canny, my freendth, canny!" piped Allardyce, who was vexed at a fine
chance for his peculiar craft being spoiled by mere brutality of
handling. All this was most inartistic. Brodie never had the fine
stroke.

Gourlay picked himself bleeding from the floor, and holding a
handkerchief to his mouth, plunged headlong from the room. He heard the
derisive roar that came after him stop, strangled by the sharp swing-to
of the door. But it seemed to echo in his burning ears as he strode
madly on through the darkness. He uncorked his mutchkin and drank it
like water. His swollen lip smarted at first, but he drank till it was a
mere dead lump to his tongue, and he could not feel the whisky on the
wound.

His mind at first was a burning whirl through drink and rage, with
nothing determined and nothing definite. But thought began to shape
itself. In a vast vague circle of consciousness his mind seemed to sit
in the centre and think with preternatural clearness. Though all around
was whirling and confused, drink had endowed some inner eye of the brain
with unnatural swift vividness. Far within the humming circle of his
mind he saw an instant and terrible revenge on Brodie, acted it, and
lived it now. His desires were murderers, and he let them slip, gloating
in the cruelties that hot fancy wreaked upon his enemy. Then he suddenly
remembered his father. A rush of fiery blood seemed to drench all his
body as he thought of what had passed between them. "But, by Heaven," he
swore, as he threw away his empty bottle, "he won't use me like that
another time; I have blood in me now." His maddened fancy began building
a new scene, with the same actors, the same conditions, as the other,
but an issue gloriously diverse. With vicious delight he heard his
father use the same sneers, the same gibes, the same brutalities; then
he turned suddenly and had him under foot, kicking, bludgeoning,
stamping the life out. He would do it, by Heaven, he would do it! The
memory of what had happened came fierily back, and made the pressing
darkness burn. His wrath was brimming on the edge, ready to burst, and
he felt proudly that it would no longer ebb in fear. Whisky had killed
fear, and left a hysterical madman, all the more dangerous because he
was so weak. Let his father try it on now; he was ready for him!

And his father was ready for him, for he knew what had happened at the
inn. Mrs. Webster, on her nightly hunt for the man she had sworn to
hon