e times inside a minute, King's
right hooked its twisted arch to the jaw; and three times Sandel's body,
heavy as it was, was levelled to the mat. Each time he took the nine
seconds allowed him and rose to his feet, shaken and jarred, but still
strong. He had lost much of his speed, and he wasted less effort. He was
fighting grimly; but he continued to draw upon his chief asset, which
was Youth. King's chief asset was experience. As his vitality had dimmed
and his vigour abated, he had replaced them with cunning, with wisdom
born of the long fights and with a careful shepherding of strength. Not
alone had he learned never to make a superfluous movement, but he had
learned how to seduce an opponent into throwing his strength away. Again
and again, by feint of foot and hand and body he continued to inveigle
Sandel into leaping back, ducking, or countering. King rested, but he
never permitted Sandel to rest. It was the strategy of Age.

Early in the tenth round King began stopping the other's rushes with
straight lefts to the face, and Sandel, grown wary, responded by drawing
the left, then by ducking it and delivering his right in a swinging hook
to the side of the head. It was too high up to be vitally effective; but
when first it landed, King knew the old, familiar descent of the black
veil of unconsciousness across his mind. For the instant, or for the
slighest fraction of an instant, rather, he ceased. In the one moment he
saw his opponent ducking out of his field of vision and the background
of white, watching faces; in the next moment he again saw his opponent
and the background of faces. It was as if he had slept for a time and
just opened his eyes again, and yet the interval of unconsciousness was
so microscopically short that there had been no time for him to fall.
The audience saw him totter and his knees give, and then saw him recover
and tuck his chin deeper into the shelter of his left shoulder.

Several times Sandel repeated the blow, keeping King partially dazed,
and then the latter worked out his defence, which was also a counter.
Feinting with his left he took a half-step backward, at the same time
upper cutting with the whole strength of his right. So accurately was
it timed that it landed squarely on Sandel's face in the full, downward
sweep of the duck, and Sandel lifted in the air and curled backward,
striking the mat on his head and shoulders. Twice King achieved this,
then turned loose and hammered