almost silent now, leaning forward, watching.
Little jerky sentences passed between them.

"Russell's goin' to box." "He can beat the cowman at that game." "Cut
him to ribbons. Blind him first."

The man in the crowd was right. Mormon knew little of boxing, but he
knew enough to throw a cushion of sturdy arm across his jaw, the left
elbow crooked, nose buried in it, eyes--one eye--indomitable above it.
And the blunted elbow like a ram, as he ducked and Russell's straight
right slid over his bald pate. He was far faster, lighter on his feet
than Russell dreamed. The bully still underestimated his man, but woke
to vivid and just appraisal as Mormon's elbow smashed against his
collar-bone, left forearm clubbing his nose, starting spurts of blood,
right fist coming up like a piston in short-armed, jolting upper-cuts.

Desperately Russell clutched, failed; held, clung, half tumbling into a
clinch. Mormon's arms were about him, underneath, binding him with hoops
of steel, compressing. He lost his footing, began to rise and he
back-heeled in an outside click. They both went down together side by
side in a dog-fall. Mormon loosed his arms as he rolled atop, got
astride of Russell, strove to gather and control the arms that thrashed
and smote.

Something jagged crushed against Mormon's temple. It seemed as if the
skull split open and a jagged, red-hot probe searched through his brain.
He threw up his head in agony, his chin exposed, but instinct still
awake to fling out both hands, catch the oncoming blow, his fingers
clamping deep about the wrist above the hand that held the rock--some
ore fragment tossed away by an old-timer--that Russell had found in the
dirt, and used in unfair, murderous intent.

The maddening pain of first impact died to a throb as the blood poured
down, seeming to leave his brain clear, cold with a rage that responded
to a deep disgust of the bully who was now at his mercy. For, with the
rage came absolute conviction that this was the end of the fight.

He screwed unmercifully, flesh and sinews and the small bones of the
wrist, until Russell shrieked through his swollen mouth at the anguish
of it and dropped the rock. Pardee, hovering near, seeing all, picked
it up and slipped it into his pocket as Mormon pinned down Russell's arm
with his left knee and swung left and right in sledge-hammer blows to
the jaw of the face that tried in vain to dodge the knockout. As if a
galvanic current that had simu