There was a striking contrast between the two fighters. The Englishman was a beautiful taper from his great shoulders to his small aristocratic feet. His muscles were long, graceful and knitted across his arms, chest, and stomach like lace leather. He was built for swift enduring action and could only have sprung from a race of men who had spent their lives in play and luxury.
Farnol Greer, on the other hand, was as heavily moulded as a bulldog. His arms were short and blocky; his shoulders welted with brawn; his chest was two hairy hills, like a gorilla's, while across his stomach muscles lay ridged like ropes. His waist was thick with pones of sinew bulging over the hips, as one sees in the statue of Discobolus. It was plain that Greer had labored tremendously all his life and that his strength was simply wonderful.
It struck Madden as a strange coincidence that these two extreme types of luxury and labor should meet in this furnace on the Sargasso and fight for the trivial reason that one offended the other's sense of music.
"All ready!" called Leonard.
The two men squared away at each other, Caradoc smiling sarcastically, Greer grim as a gallows. Utter silence fell over the crowd. The fighters crouched, bare fists up, staring at each other over the tips of their guards.
For a moment Smith shifted around his man on his toes. He seemed as light as a cat. Greer stood solid and merely turned on his flat feet. Suddenly Caradoc's long right whipped out with a crack against the shorter man's forehead. Greer made no sign of having received a blow, although a dull red splotch slowly formed on his frontal. Caradoc led another right, which Greer blocked, then the Englishman bored through with a stinging left to the hairy chest.
"Go afther him! Kill him!" cried Hogan to his principal. "Nixt toime he thries to hit ye, knock off his head for his impidence!"
"Aye, 'it 'im! Don't take nothin' off of 'im!" advised two of the cockneys. Sympathy lay with the smaller man.
Smith continued his tiptoe dance and led a straight right. Instantly his massive enemy ducked, leaped in under his guard, and there came the dull thud of in-fighting; Greer's black head jammed up against Caradoc's chin, his great muscular back bent half double, his tremendous arms working like pistons.
The crew howled at this sharp unexpected attack. Caradoc rescued himself by shoving open palms against the big bulging shoulders, and pushing himself away from this battering ram. Smith bumped into some onlookers, and got behind his guard some ten feet away from Greer. The Englishman's fine-grained stomach was covered with pink welts from his punishment. He had ceased smiling and was watching his man carefully. As a matter of fact, he had expected to dispose of Greer easily—as a gentleman disposes of a clod-hopper. But the heavy-set boy's method of fighting was new and effective. Likewise there seemed to be a certain grim system about it.