Feltman met him in midring; a horribly battered and staggering Feltman, who sought to improve on his minute’s rest by feinting with the left and then aiming a great right swing for the head.
The swing did not land. Disregarding the feint, Rorke had bored in. The swing passed beyond him, while his two fists were greedily busy with infighting at his tired adversary’s body. Across the ring and to the ropes, with all his ebbing force, he hammered Feltman. Against the ropes he drove him. Then, as Feltman rebounded from the impact, Dan flung every remaining sinew of strength into a cross-body right for the jaw.
It was a reckless blow, except as a counter. And Feltman saw it coming in time. But his worn-out guard would not obey the dazed brain’s mandate quickly enough to block the mighty punch. Rorke’s rage-driven right fist caught his opponent flush on the point of the chin. And Feltman sprawled prone on his face.
Quietly, non-dramatically, he lay there, dead to the world while the referee counted. At the count of eight Feltman tried instinctively to get up. But he succeeded only in rolling over on his back.
Cut to ribbons, bleeding, bruised, aching and all but blinded, Dan Rorke suffered the exultant Keegan and Bud to guide him down to his dressing room. He had won. He had thrashed the man who had poisoned Jeff. This much his dizzy senses told him.
But Feltman was still alive. And Jeff was dead. Dan’s heart was like cold lead beneath his bruised ribs. His sensational victory was as ashes and dust to him. He was deaf to Keegan’s hysterical adulation. Nothing mattered.
Bud Curly swung open the dressing-room door. Over the threshold swept a whirlwind of gold and white, barking rapturously and flinging itself upon Rorke’s bleeding chest.
(Long afterwards Dan listened with a foolish grin on his swollen face while Keegan confessed the truly Keeganesque trick whereby he had sought to lure back his man to an acceptance of the sure-to-win foul tactics; of the hiding of Jeff in a neighbour’s cellar for the day; and the spiriting of him into the dressing room after the fight began; of the coaching of Curly into indorsing the tale of poison and of Bud’s part in the mock grave digging,—a digging timed nicely to coincide with Dan’s appearance on the porch.)
All this, much later. But, for the instant, the only thing Dan Rorke knew was that his dead pet—or its ghost, it did not matter which—had come back to him; and that everything was once more tremendously worth while and that the world was a gorgeous place to do one’s living in.
Forgetful of hurts and of weakness, he gathered the ecstatically squirming collie into his battered bare arms and babbled sobbingly: