“Bring your sledge, Jimmy,” shouted some humorist; “you'll need it.”
The Peach Orchard might have been a peach orchard in the days of Peter Stuyvesant. All formal battles took place in the Peach Orchard. Wherefore, and because the challenge for its propriety was not without precedent, to the Peach Orchard at the hour named I repaired.
Jimmy the Blacksmith, however, came not. Someone brought the word that he was sick; whereat those present, being fifty gentlemen with a curiosity to look on carnage, and ones whose own robust health led them to regard the term “sickness” as a synonym for the preposterous, jeered the name of Jimmy the Blacksmith from their hearts.
“Jimmy the Cur! it ought to be,” growled one, whose disappointment over a fight deferred was sore in the extreme.
Perhaps you will argue that it smacked of the underhand to thus steal upon Jimmy the Blacksmith and take his place from him without due warning given. I confess it would have been more like chivalry if I had sent him, so to say, a glove and told my intentions against him. Also it would have augmented labor and multiplied risk. The great thing is to win and win cheaply; a victory that costs more than it comes to is nothing but a mask for defeat.
“You're down and out,” said Big Kennedy, when Jimmy the Blacksmith brought his injuries to that chieftain. “Your reputation is gone too; you were a fool to say 'Peach Orchard' when you lacked the nerve to make it good. You'll never hold up your head ag'in in th' ward, an' if I was you I'd line out after Gaffney. This is a bad ward for a mongrel, Jimmy, an' I'd skin out.”
Jimmy the Blacksmith followed Gaffney and disappeared from the country of Big Kennedy. He was to occur again in my career, however, as he who reads on shall see, and under conditions which struck the color from my cheek and set my heart to a trot with the terrors they loosed at its heels.