There was standing before them
not the Terry O'Ryan they had known, but another. He threw himself fully
into his part--a young rancher made deputy sheriff, who by the occasional
exercise of his duty had incurred the hatred of a small floating
population that lived by fraud, violence, and cattle-stealing. The
conspiracy was to raid his cattle, to lure him to pursuit, to ambush him,
and kill him. Terry now played the part with a naturalness and force
which soon lifted the play away from the farcical element introduced into
it by those who had interpolated the gibes at himself. They had gone a
step too far.
"He's going large," said Gow Johnson, as the act drew near its close,
and the climax neared, where O'Ryan was to enter upon a physical struggle
with his assailants. "His blood's up. There'll be hell to pay."
To Gow Johnson the play had instantly become real, and O'Ryan an injured
man at bay, the victim of the act--not of the fictitious characters of
the play, but of the three men, Fergus, Holden, and Constantine Jopp, who
had planned the discomfiture of O'Ryan; and he felt that the victim's
resentment would fall heaviest on Constantine Jopp, the bully, an old
schoolmate of Terry's.
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