For a few seconds we stared stupidly at each other, and then, because I was too nervous to stand still, I began dancing around my stolid opponent. He followed me with his eyes, owl fashion, not moving his huge, flat feet until I was almost behind him.
"He's slower even than I thought," I told myself, and began to feel better.
After prancing in a couple of circles without making my burly antagonist do more than mark time to keep me in eye-sweep, I plucked up courage and, stepping in quickly, drove for his prognathous jaw. Without the flicker of an eyelash, he bent his great neck and took the blow in the depths of his woolly hair. Hardly did he seem to need to brace himself, so completely was the force taken up in this natural shock-absorber. To sharp hooks in the ribs and upper abdomen he replied in the same passive way, ducking his head whether I led for the face or not. With a chest like the bulge of a steam boiler and three inches of corrugated iron muscles armouring his solar plexus, there was no need of guarding anything but his face, and this he did by the simple expedient of putting out his foot-deep shock of matted hair every time I made a feint in that direction.
"The dolt is no more than a human punching-bag," I told myself; "but even a punching-bag has been known to break if hammered long enough," forthwith beginning to try the effect of persistent hammering. Scored as a sparring contest, I would have won the decision by a hundred points to nil, for the stolid monster seemed perfectly content to let me circle around him and hit almost when and where I pleased. But we were fighting under Fijian rules, which hold that the contest, undivided by rounds, shall continue until one of the parties is unwilling, or unable, to go on. Now and then, when I would hook a stiff jolt in under the fringe of his mop to the side of the neck, he would wince a bit, but most of the time he simply stood with bowed head and set muscles and let me pound away. It may be that my blows lacked steam after my long day of unwonted exertion under the tropical sun, or it may be that the hulking frame, with its armour of knotted muscles, was damage-proof as long as the jaw was protected. One thing was certain, at any rate,—the only effect of my frenzied hammering was to tire myself out without discomfiting, or even, apparently, annoying my burly opponent in the least.
"Take it easy to sunset and we'll call it off for a draw," muttered Tom behind me as I stepped back to get my breath after beating a sounding tattoo of right and left hooks in a vain effort to jar the armoured solar plexus of the Cave Man.
It was sound advice and I should probably have followed it had not the Honourable Bertie—he had been brought to a few minutes previously and was just awakening to an interest in his surroundings—cut in with "Don't quit. Step in close and uppercut straight up for his face. Remember you're the 'White Hope.'"
There certainly did seem room to slip one up between the dome of the swelling chest and the fringes of the hair-mop that would do some damage, provided one only went in close enough, and, without stopping to ponder the possible consequences, I stepped forward and drove a hard right uppercut, just as Bertie had suggested. Smash! My glove landed squarely in the middle of Cave Man's face, straightening him up with a jerk and offering the very opening for the jaw that I had awaited ever since the bout began. I was just starting a left hook of which I entertained high hopes, when, closely following the roar of pain and rage which signalized the landing of my right, something swift and terrific as a Bolt of Wrath came hurtling against my jaw, an explosion like the Crack of Doom rang in my ears, and—I came to some hours later to find a sedate-looking Fijian lady in sombre black—the Mbuli's wife—massaging my bruised face with one hand and holding a Bible from which she was reading in the other. An austere-faced white woman, whom I thought I recognized as the missionary's wife, was renewing a turtle-steak poultice upon one of the Honourable Bertie's rainbow-coloured optics, while a Fijian in a long coat and black sulu was kneading out the cramp-knotted muscles in Tom's overworked calves. The three of us were in the little mission hospital.
"The Reverend B—— and his wife have been working over you since sundown," said Bertie thickly through a bandage. "In fact, they've been very kind to all of us in the matter of lending 'first aid.' We've apologized for stirring up all this jolly rumpus here, and Tom and I have promised to leave with you for Suva as soon as you're able to travel. It may comfort you a bit, old chap, to know that the Reverend B—— has just gone over to set the nose of your late opponent. Perhaps you don't remember that you landed a tap just before he hit you."
"Oh, that was what it was," I said with a sigh of comprehension, sinking back upon the pillows. "I thought some one had been practising with the twenty-pound hammer again."
The last thing I recall before dropping off to sleep was the sound of singing and beaten war-drums welling up from the village green. "The Fijians celebrate the triumph of the Polynesian," explained Bertie in answer to my look of inquiry. "That chant is one they used to sing on returning from a successful foray laden with the heads of many enemies. They seem to trace some similarity between the two occasions."