I’d prayed Corkey to try and surprise Bray at the very start if he could, and have a hit at Bray’s face the moment they began. And I’m blessed if he didn’t go and do it! Bray began fiddling about jolly scientifically with his hands, and I fancy he just squinted down to see if his feet were scientific too. At the same moment Corkey buzzed round his right and let Bray have it fairly on the nose. Bray jumped and looked about as much surprised as if he’d been struck by lightning; and Blanchard said:
“First blood for Corkey minimus!”
I yelled--I oughtn’t to have, but I did--because to see blood dropping about on Bray’s chest was a fine sight. He sniffed and went for Corkey smiling. The smile was the beastliest part of it, for I hoped he would have got his wool off a bit and been wild. But he wasn’t, and when he began to hit, Corkey got flustered and swung about like a windmill and caught it pretty hot. Yet he jerked his head so jolly quick that he didn’t get more than about four smacks on it in the first round, though his body, which was white by nature, was pretty soon covered with red marks. He said they didn’t hurt, and I cleaned him up and blew water over him at the end of the round. His lip was bleeding like mad, but luckily inside, where his tooth had cut it; and he swallowed all the blood, so nobody knew; besides which the blood wasn’t lost. Bray flung himself down in his corner, and Fowle looked after him; and even at a solemn time like that I laughed, and so did Corkey minimus, because Fowle tried to be too clever, and spurted a lot of water out of his mouth into Bray’s eye. Then Bray told him that after the fight he’d tie him in knots and kick him, looking forward to which, of course, wrecked Fowle’s enjoyment entirely.
Blanchard said “Time!” again awfully soon, and I saw Bray meant settling Corkey now, because his reputation as a fighter was at stake, and he knew Corkey hoped to get through three rounds with luck. So Bray began hitting him like hammers, and though I was about as sorry for Corkey minimus as a chap could be, nobody would have been able to help admiring the way Bray hit. It was just at the end of this round, when Corkey had been knocked down once, but got up again, that the awful rum thing with Milly Dunston happened.
Suddenly, without any warning, there was a noise like fowls getting up a hedge, and she rushed out from behind the woodstack with her eyes blazing and her hair streaming like a comet in a bate. She’d been running a good way, I should think, and she tore right into the ring straight at Bray, and not trusting to words at a time like that, and not remembering her father was a clergyman, or anything, slapped his face both sides, and jolly hard too. Bray swore the horriblest words I ever heard used by a chap, because she’d given him more in half a second than Corkey could have in a year. Then he got into his shirt upside-down and hooked it with Fowle, but not before he heard her say:
“You little, fat, red-headed coward to fight and try and murder a boy half your age and size! I wish I could kill you, I do. It’s shameful to think you’re an English boy at all!”
Then she turned on the chaps from the Fifth, and told Blanchard he was a disgrace to the school. So they cleared out too; and then she cried over Corkey, and said she would rather have been torn to pieces by unchained monsters than have let him be mangled like he was. And Corkey, who was pretty well dazed, forgave her, and told her kindly to go away. And she gasped and gurgled, and went.
I took Corkey back, and one or two things got to be known. It came out that Fowle had told Milly the place and the hour of the fight, but only after she had sworn--on some rotten saint Fowle knew--that she would not tell a single soul about it. She kept her swear all right, but came herself. And when Bray got to hear how it was she came--of course, thinking Corkey had told her, which he would rather have died than do--then Bray tried a lot of Chinese tortures on Fowle that he’d seen at a wax-works. And chaps who saw it said that Fowle was so excited at the time that he called upon about twenty different well-known Bible characters by name to come and help him and destroy Bray. But they didn’t.
As for Corkey minimus, the things he got from Milly after that fight you wouldn’t believe. There were bottles of stuff to rub bruises with, and lozenges and grapes, and some muck for his eye, and little baskets of strawberries, and jolly books and rosebuds. She told the Doctor about slapping Bray’s face, and wrote a long letter of apology afterwards; and a week later she broke it to Corkey minimus that she was going to a boarding-school herself next term; which she did.
When Corkey told me about it he added: