"I'll break every bone in your body!" he vowed.

"You little, sneering bantam, I'll smash your face in! I'll thrash you to a pulp!" The other threw up his head and laughed.

He was sublimely unafraid.

But his dark eyes shone red as he flung back the challenge.

"All right, you drunken bully! Try!" he said.
They stood in the garish light of a Queensland bar, surrounded by an eager, gaping crowd of farmers, boundary-riders, sheep-shearers, who had come down to this township on the coast on business or pleasure at the end of the shearing season.
None of them knew how the young Englishman came to be among them.