My adversary advanced towards me, half prancing, with his hands high, his elbows out, his face red, and his straw jerking about like a steam-engine. It might be showy form, I thought, but from the very little I knew of boxing it was not good. And the closer we approached the more convinced of this I was, and the more hope I seemed to have of coming out of the affair creditably.
Now, reader, whoever you are, before I go further I ask you to remember that I am recording in this book not what I ought to have done, but what I did do. You will very likely have your own opinions as to what I should have done under the circumstances. You may think that I should, at all costs, have declined to fight; you may think I should have summoned the police; you may think I should have stood with my hands behind my back till my face was the size of a football, and about the same colour; or you may think I was right in standing up to hit my man, and doing all I knew to demolish him. Do not let me embarrass your judgment; my duty just now is merely to tell you what did happen.
As I expected, Whipcord’s idea seemed to be to knock me out of time at the very beginning of the encounter, and therefore during the first round I found it needed all my efforts to frustrate this little design, without attempting on my part to take the offensive.
As it was, I did not altogether succeed, for, Whipcord being taller than I, I could not help coming in for one or two downward blows, which, however, thanks to my hard head, seemed more formidable to the spectators than they really were.
“Not half bad,” was Flanagan’s encouraging comment when in due time I retired to his side for a short breathing space. “I never thought you’d be so well up to him. Are you much damaged?”
“No,” said I.
“Well, you’d best play steady this next round too,” said my second. “He can’t hold out long with his elbows that height. If you like you can have a quiet shot or two at his breastplate, just to get your hand in for the next round.”
This advice I, now quite warmed up to the emergency, adopted.
Whipcord returned to his sledge-hammer tactics, and as carelessly as ever, too; for more than once I got in under his guard, and once, amid terrific plaudits, got “home”—so Flanagan called it—on his chin, in a manner which, I flattered myself, fairly astonished him.
“Now then, Whip, what are you thinking about?” cried the Field-Marshal; “you aren’t going to let the young ’un lick you, surely?”