iff and lame from the incessant fighting. His forearms were black and
blue from wrist to elbow, what of the countless blows he had warded off,
and here and there the tortured flesh was beginning to fester. His head
and arms and shoulders ached, the small of his back ached,--he ached all
over, and his brain was heavy and dazed. He did not play at school. Nor
did he study. Even to sit still all day at his desk, as he did, was a
torment. It seemed centuries since he had begun the round of daily
fights, and time stretched away into a nightmare and infinite future of
daily fights. Why couldn't Cheese-Face be licked? he often thought; that
would put him, Martin, out of his misery. It never entered his head to
cease fighting, to allow Cheese-Face to whip him.

And so he dragged himself to the Enquirer alley, sick in body and soul,
but learning the long patience, to confront his eternal enemy, Cheese-
Face, who was just as sick as he, and just a bit willing to quit if it
were not for the gang of newsboys that looked on and made pride painful
and necessary. One afternoon, after twenty minutes of desperate efforts
to annihilate each other according to set rules that did not permit
kicking, striking below the belt, nor hitting when one was down, Cheese-
Face, panting for breath and reeling, offered to call it quits. And
Martin, head on arms, thrilled at the picture he caught of himself, at
that moment in the afternoon of long ago, when he reeled and panted and
choked with the blood that ran into his mouth and down his throat from
his cut lips; when he tottered toward Cheese-Face, spitting out a
mouthful of blood so that he could speak, crying out that he would never
quit, though Cheese-Face could give in if he wanted to. And Cheese-Face
did not give in, and the fight went on.

The next day and the next, days without end, witnessed the afternoon
fight. When he put up his arms, each day, to begin, they pained
exquisitely, and the first few blows, struck and received, racked his
soul; after that things grew numb, and he fought on blindly, seeing as in
a dream, dancing and wavering, the large features and burning, animal-
like eyes of Cheese-Face. He concentrated upon that face; all else about
him was a whirling void. There was nothing else in the world but that
face, and he would never know rest, blessed rest, until he had beaten
that face into a pulp with his bleeding knuckles, or until the bleeding
knuckles that someh