The fight came off on a Wednesday at about three in the afternoon and the athlete and myself had two teamsters as witnesses to the affair.
All day I had been bedeviling him—being just as downright ugly and nasty as I could, clipping him on the shins with several flying kegs, making my apologies as insolently as possible and when he started telling one of his endless nasty tales to the teamsters starting a loud conversation on some other subject just as he was about to come to the nub of his story. The teamsters felt the fight brewing and wanted to encourage it. They purposely listened to me and did not hear the nub.
He thought, I dare say, that I would never be foolish enough to fight him and I must have taken his scorn of me for timidity for I suddenly grew very bold. He was coming in at the door of the house just as I was on my way out behind one of the kegs and I suddenly stopped it, looked him squarely in the eyes and then, with an attempt at the golden smile on my lips, sent the keg flying directly at him.
He leaped over the keg and came toward me in silence and I prepared to bring my technique into play. Really I had, at the moment, a great deal of confidence in myself and began at once rocking my head, making queer little shifting movements with my feet and trying to establish a kind of cross rhythm in my shoulders and head that would, I felt, confuse him.
He looked at me lost in astonishment and I decided to lead. Had I been content to hit him in the belly with my right, putting all my strength back of the blow and then had I begun kicking, biting and pummeling furiously, I might have come out all right. He was so astonished—no doubt, like Nora, he thought me quite bughouse—that the right would surely have landed, but that, you see, was not the technique of the situation.
The thing was to feint for the belly and then “pull one’s punch” as it were, and immediately afterwards whip over the powerful left to the jaw. But my left was not powerful and anyway it did not land.
He knocked me down and when I got up and started my gymnastics again he knocked me down a second time and a third and a fourth. He knocked me down perhaps a dozen times and the two teamsters came to the door to watch and all the time there was the most foolish look on his face and on their faces. It was a look a bulldog attacked by a hen might have assumed—no doubt by my bullyragging I had convinced them, as I had myself, I could fight—but presently both my eyes were so swollen and my nose and mouth so bruised and cut that I could not see and so I got to my feet and walked away, going out of the warehouse in the midst of an intense silence on the part of all three of the spectators.
And so along a street I went to my room, followed by two or three curious children who perhaps thought I had been hit by a freight train and succeeded in also getting my door bolted against any sudden descent of Nora. My eyes were very evidently going to be badly discolored, my nose bled and my lips were badly cut, and so, after bathing my face in cold water, I put a wet towel over it and went and threw myself on the bed.
It was one of those moments that come, I presume, into every man’s life. I was lying on my bed in my room, in the condition already described, the door was bolted, Nora was not directly about and I was out from under the eyes of my fellowmen.
I tried to think as one will at such moments.