teeth clenched behind the open lips, giving him an ugly, furious expression, strange to his face. He took a quick stride towards the officer, raised his whip and brought it down with the full strength of his shoulder in one cutting blow across the baggy, purplish cheeks of the insolent speaker.

[Pg 23]

[Pg 23]

CHAPTER II

A STRONG MAN IS BOWED

The whole thing was so unexpected that for one moment not a man in the room drew breath. Then the colonel sprang up with the bellow of an enraged bull, overturning the table in his rush, and a dozen club members were pulling him back from Eric.

"Eric Hamilton, are you mad?" I cried. "What do you mean?"

But Hamilton stood motionless as if he saw none of us. Except that his breath was labored, he wore precisely the same strange, distracted air he had on entering the club.

"Hold back!" I implored; for Adderly was striking right and left to get free from the men. "Hold back! There's a mistake! Something's wrong!"

"Reptile!" roared the colonel. "Cowardly reptile, you shall pay for this!"

"There's a mistake," I shouted, above the clamor of exclamations.

"Glad the mistake landed where it did, all the same," whispered Uncle Jack MacKenzie in my ear, "but get him out of this. Drunk—or a scandal," says my uncle, who always expressed[Pg 24] himself in explosives when excited. "Side room—here—lead him in—drunk—by Jove—drunk!"

[Pg 24]

"Never," I returned passionately. I knew both Hamilton and his wife too well to tolerate either insinuation. But we led him like a dazed being into a side office, where Mr. Jack MacKenzie promptly turned the key and took up a posture with his back against the door.

"Now, Sir," he broke out sternly, "if it's neither drink, nor a scandal——" There, he stopped; for Hamilton, utterly unconscious of us, moved, rather than walked, automatically across the room. Throwing his hat down, he bowed his head over both arms above the mantel-piece.

My uncle and I looked from the silent man to each other. Raising 

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