"Don't talk to me. You are a drunken nuisance. Go away before
something happens to you."

Again he turned away, but the drunken man seized and whirled him
about, repeating his abuse, encouraged by this apparent patience.

"Your pardon for an instant, gentlemen." McNamara laid a large
white and manicured hand upon the flannel sleeve of the miner and
gently escorted him through the entrance to the sidewalk, while
the crowd smiled.

As they cleared the threshold, however, he clenched his fist
without a word and, raising it, struck the sot fully and cruelly
upon the jaw. His victim fell silently, the back of his head
striking the boards with a hollow thump; then, without even
observing how he lay, McNamara re-entered the saloon and took up
his conversation where he had been interrupted. His voice was as
evenly regulated as his movements, betraying not a sign of anger,
excitement, or bravado. He lit a cigarette, extracted a note-book,
and jotted down certain memoranda supplied him by Mexico Mullins.

All this time the body lay across the threshold without a sign of
life. The buzz of the roulette-wheel was resumed and the crap-
dealer began his monotonous routine. Every eye was fixed on the
nonchalant man at the bar, but the unconscious creature outside
the threshold lay unheeded, for in these men's code it behooves
the most humane to practise a certain aloofness in the matter of
private brawls.