But he didn't. Carstairs knocked him down again, and he lay like a log. Still he was up again before the last second was counted. It was astonishing where he got the power from, but he rushed in again like a whirlwind.
Carstairs, cool and precise, but very quick, his grey eyes hard as steel, jabbed him off, and off, and off, till he saw what he wanted, then his wide shoulders swept a half circle in the air, swinging cleanly from the hips; his great, strong, right leg, trailing to the rear like a stay, braced itself suddenly rigid; and the right fist, tightly clenched at the moment of impact, shot out clean and true in a perfectly straight line to the point of Darwen's eagerly extended jaw: it was a perfect blow, showing a beautiful, smooth ripple as one muscle after the other took up its task; then remaining rigid like a statue for one second, with lips firmly closed, and the eyes—the entire expression of the face, full of definite, resolute purpose; Carstairs for that second seemed more than a man. None but a man with his long record of clean living and strict training could have risen to such a blow after receiving such a pounding as he had.
Darwen dropped for the last time.
There was a tense silence as Bounce stood over him, the tenth second was called and still he lay there; his seconds picked him up and dabbed his face with a wet handkerchief; slowly the light of intelligence returned to his eyes. He sat up and looked round. There was a subdued cheer; the navvies were unusually moved, they felt, somehow, that this was more than an ordinary fight, every one was still for fully a minute, the silence was oppressive. God knows what was passing in those five hundred rugged minds. Carstairs himself was strangely impressed; in after life he never forgot it. He felt, he said, as though he had come suddenly to the last peak of a majestic mountain, and saw a wondrous valley spread out below him.
Darwen's seconds stood behind him holding up his shoulders. They were quite still, they said no word as he looked slowly and vacantly round; then, without warning, he bent his head forward into his hands and wept like a child.
A beaten man is the most pathetic sight in all Nature: these men were used to death, they had seen their bosom chums killed, squashed flat by falling rocks, buried alive in the earth, mangled by machinery; but when Darwen wept they turned their heads.
The young gipsy moved up to Carstairs, as he stood alone, and whispered in his ear: "I knew you'd win. You'll always win, win whatever you want." A small hand reached out and dropped an emerald ring on to the little heap of his clothes over which he was bending; as he put out his hand to pick it up, he felt the pressure of warm, soft lips on his cheek. He started up in amazement, but the gipsy had melted into the crowd like a shadow. One or two of the navvies who had seen it grinned from ear to ear, and Carstairs blushed from his forehead to his neck.
"That was a girl," a navvy said. "I thought he was slim like, too."
Carstairs said nothing, but dressed very quickly.