The two men came against each other in grips, and almost before he had exerted himself the Irishman found himself in the merciless vise of a half-Nelson that buried him head and shoulders in the snow.

Joe Hines, ex-lumber-jack, came down with an impact equal to a fall from a two-story building--his overthrow accomplished by a cross-buttock, delivered, he claimed, before he was ready.
There was nothing exhausting in all this to Daylight.

He did not heave and strain through long minutes.

No time, practically, was occupied.
His body exploded abruptly and terrifically in one instant, and on the next instant was relaxed.

Thus, Doc Watson, the gray-bearded, iron bodied man without a past, a fighting terror himself, was overthrown in the fraction of a second preceding his own onslaught.