There was much debate as to which was the better man. A majority inclined to the Cornishman for that he was always and instantly ready to try it out, whereas Thane put every challenge aside, not as if he were afraid but with an air of distaste.
“I’m making no show of myself,” he said.
“Show be damned,” the eggers said. “The man is braggin’ he can do yu. Ain’t that a show?”
No use. He could not be goaded into a public match. Many misunderstood it. The Cornishman particularly was misled. He got the notion that Thane was afraid of him, and so he became arrogant and offensive.
This is what had been going on for some time. It was what was going on now in the path to the great wonder of a special, fascinated audience of one.
The Cornishman, jutting his chin piece further and further out, did the boasting. Thane answered him with contemptuous looks and now and then a derisive word. Suddenly they brought it to a head. As with one impulse they walked a little apart, put down their dinner baskets, threw off their caps and slipped out of their shirts. This seemed all one movement. Then, facing at the same instant, they drew slowly together. Their bodies, nude to the middle, were crouched in a manner that gave Agnes a new and terrific sensation of the human form, especially of its splendid, destructive power. Each had his left arm upraised and bent, as if to guard his face and head, and in their eyes the lust of combat glistened.
Agnes was transfixed with horror and at the same time thrilled as she had never been thrilled in her life before. No excitement she had ever imagined, waking or dreaming, was remotely comparable to this. She perhaps could not have run if she had tried; she would not have tried if she had thought of it. She thought of nothing. She sat perfectly still, her mouth hard set, her hands clenched, a look in her eyes she would not have believed in her own mirror.
The fighters seemed to pursue each other slowly in a small circle, eye to eye, sparring a little, and Agnes gasped with delight. They moved with the fluid ease and unconscious grace of leopards, and gave the same impression of tense coiled strength. She had not the faintest idea hitherto that the man thing could be like this.
Then, so swiftly that she did not see it, the first clean blow went in, with the sound of a butcher’s cleaver falling on the block. The effect of that sound upon Agnes was tremendous. She felt a swooning of worlds in the pit of her stomach. Solids were fluid. Her moorings gave way. Nothing in her experience of men had prepared her for the possibility of this. She had seen below the surface. The surface would never be the same again. What an awful sound! She felt she could not bear to hear it again; yet she listened for it breathlessly, frantically.
She saw blood on the tall one’s face. That did not make her sick. It made her violently partisan. She has been so all the time without knowing it. Thought of the heavy brute winning was intolerable. She could not see his face distinctly, for he crouched much lower than his antagonist and looked out from under his shaggy eyebrows, thus presenting the top of his head. When by accident, however, his face did come into full view she was relieved to see that he was bleeding freely. The tall one in fact was not bleeding at all. It was the other’s blood transferred to him. And then, as she saw how it was really going, she beat her knees with her fists and could hardly restrain the impulse to cry out.