ashing out to right and left.

So savagely he charged that I looked for nothing short of murder; and
just then, while I stood at gaze, a boy stepped up to me--the same
that Ted Bates had plucked by the arm.

"Look here!" said he, frowning, with his legs a-straddle.
"Doggy Bates tells me that you told him you could whack me with one
hand behind you."

I replied that I had told Doggy Bates nothing of the sort.

"That's all right," said he. "Then you take it back?"

He had the air of one sure of his logic, but his under lip--not to
mention his ears--protruded in a way that struck me as offensive, and
I replied--

"That depends."

"My name's Stokes," said he, still in the same reasonable tone.
"And you'll have to take coward's blow."

"Oh, indeed!" said I.

"It's the rule," said he, and gave it me with a light, back-handed
smack across the bridge of the nose; whereupon I hit him on the point
of the chin, and, unconsciously imitating Captain Coffin's method of
charging a crowd, lowered my head and butted him violently in the
stomach.

I make no doubt that my brain was tired and giddy with the day's
experiences, but to this moment I cannot understand why we two
suddenly found ourselves the focus of interest in a crowd which had
wasted none on Captain Coffin.

But so it was. In less time than it takes to write, a ring
surrounded us--a ring of men staring and offering bets. The lamp at
the street-corner shone on their faces; and close under the light of
it Master Stokes and I were hammering one another.

We were fighting by rule, too. Some one--I cannot say who--had taken
up the affair, and was imposing the right ceremonial upon us. It may
have been the cheerful, blue-jerseyed Irishman, to whose knee I
returned at the end of each round to be freshened up around the face
and neck with a dripping boat-sponge. He had an extraordinarily wide
mouth, and it kept speaking encouragement and good advice to me.
I feel sure he was a good fellow, but have never set eyes on him from
that hour to this.

Bully Stokes and I must have fought a good many rounds, for towards
the end we were both panting hard, and our hands hung on every blow.
But I remember yet more vividly the strangeness of it all, and the
uncanny sensation that the fight itself, the street-lamp, the crowd,
and the dim houses around were unreal as a dream: that, and the
unnatural hardness of my opponent's face, which seemed the one
unmalleable part of h