The next morning found Mr. Tupper still on deck. Evidently a steady diet of strong whisky and rough-and-tumble fighting agreed with his peculiar constitution. That night we were all but done; two hours’ work in the morning would put the Moon in shape for the down-river journey. And when evening fell I took a notion to walk up and down the streets of Benton once more. It may have been that the prospect of getting to St. Louis in the near future made me desire to flaunt my independence in the face of the mate. Anyway, without stopping to make a critical analysis of motives, I slipped away from the Moon when dark closed in. The engineer came aboard a minute before I left, and I heard him call to his assistant that Tupper was a sheet and a half in the wind, and still wearing his fighting-clothes. But I took no thought of turning back.
Right up the main street I marched, venturing into one saloon after another without mishap. I felt quite elated, like a small boy playing “hookey” from school. And when, in the course of my prowling about, I ran into a half dozen hilarious cowpunchers I clean forgot Mr. Tupper and the unkind things he had promised to do to me.
The camp of these cattlemen, I gathered from their talk, was on the divide that loomed to the north of Benton, and after the manner of their kind they were “taking in the town” for the first time in many weeks. Wherefore, they were thirsty and noisy, and insistent that everybody should drink and be joyful. To one of them, a youngster near my own age, slim, sinewy, picturesque in his hair-faced chaps and high-heeled boots, I talked a little, but it was a hit-and-miss conversation, by reason of the general uproar, and the rapidity with which drinks came. I was all for information, and in his free-and-easy way he shed beams of light upon my black ignorance of range affairs. But alas! a discordant element burst rudely in upon our talk-fiesta. Tupper stalked in from the street, and chance decreed that his roving, belligerent eye should single me out of the crowd. I was leaning against a disreputable billiard table, at the time, and straight for me he came, not saying a word, but squinting up his little, pig eyes in a manner that boded ill.
I didn’t move. Though my heart flopped like a new-landed trout, I couldn’t quite bring myself to slink away. Beaten and bluffed and cowed as I had been for the past two weeks, I hadn’t quite lost the power to resent, and though I shrank from the weight of Tupper’s ungodly fists I shrank more from absolute flight. Something of the atmosphere of the ranges had crept into me that evening. I did not know what I was about to do, except that I was not going to run away from any red-whiskered brute from St. Louis or any other section of the globe.
He came up close to me, stopped, and regarded me a moment, as if amazed to see me standing there and making no move to go. And then with a quick hunch of his shoulders he swung a dirty fist for my jaw. But that time I fooled Mr. Tupper by sidestepping; I was watching him, and he was a bit oversure. Again he struck out, first with one hand and then the other. This time one of the blows landed, glancingly. His red, ugly countenance lurching toward me, his whisky-sodden breath in my face was more than I could stand; and when that vicious swing grazed my chin as I backed away, I ducked under his arm and smashed him on his reviling mouth.
It almost paid me for all the abuse I’d taken off him, that one good blow. The backward roll of his head, the quick spurt of blood where my knuckles split his lip, sent a quiver of joy over me. Had he been of the bigness of a house and equipped with two pair of fists I would gladly have fought him after that one punch. It showed me that I could hurt him. It gave me a hungry craving for more. I wanted to beat his ugly little eyes, his squat, round-nostriled nose, and his whisky-guzzling mouth into indistinguishable pulp.
But it was new business to me, and so instead of keeping at him hammer and tongs till he was down and out, I waited for him to rush me again. Wherein I made a sad mistake. If I had battered him down then and there—if—if! At any rate, he did come with a rush, and he came fortified with a wide knowledge of fist tactics to protect him from another such blow as I had dealt him. He fought me halfway across the room, and had me bleeding like a stuck pig before I connected with him again. But eventually one of my wild swings slipped through his guard, and jolted his head backward; the little bloodshot eyes of him blinked with the jar of it. And again I made a mistake. Instead of standing off and hammering him with clean straight punches, I rushed to close quarters. Half crazed with pain and anger I stepped in, swinging short right and left blows for his wabbling head, and so came within the sweep of his great arms.
He clinched, and in his grip I was next thing to helpless. One thing only could I do, and that was to butt him in the face with my head—which kindly office I performed to the best of my ability, until he jammed me hard against the billiard table and bent me backward till I felt my bones crack. And then with his thumb he deliberately set about gouging out one of my eyes.
I can feel it yet, the fierce pain and the horrible fear that overtook me when he jabbed at my eye-ball. I don’t know how I broke his hold. I only recollect that, half-blinded, hot searing pangs shooting along my optic nerve, I found myself free of him. And as I backed away from his outstretched paws my hand, sweeping along the billiard table, met and closed upon a hard, round object. With all the strength that was in me I flung it straight at his head. He went to the floor with a neat, circular depression in his forehead, just over the left eye.
There was a hush in the saloon. One of the cattlemen stooped over him.