I felt as if I were fighting in a dream, and for my life or something. What brought me to, paradoxically enough, was a glancing blow from a light wrench. In a second my mind snapped to attention, and for a moment I was a strong man as I saw myself knocked out with a piece of iron. He had evidently grabbed the wrench from one of the shelves as I fell over the chest.
With feet and fists flying so fast they must have looked like a spinning pinwheel, I threw him off, and staggered to my feet. I gave him no quarter. He had trouble getting up for a minute. I had one of his eyes closed and his head was none too clear. He hadn’t got across the tool chest before I socked him a beauty, and he went crashing against the shelves.
Staggering and dizzy as I was, I had enough left. His hands dropped helplessly, and I lifted him about two inches off the floor and deposited him four feet away and flat on his back with a roundhouse swing. Between measuring, getting my arm back and smacking him he had time enough to light a cigaret and smoke it, but he was too weak and blind and dazed and whatever else a man is when he’s out on his feet, even to block it. Maybe he didn’t see it. Anyway, he saw stars a minute later.
He lay on the floor, unable to move but not mentally out. I parked myself on a tool chest, and devoted my exclusive attention to inhaling large gobs of air into my laboring lungs. No use of talking, I was getting soft at that period. A little scrap got me gasping like Paul Revere’s horse.
Finally I was able to light a cigaret, and as its soothing flavor was beginning to permeate the stuffy air of the tool room my dear friend Marston rose on his hind legs and peered at me through one good eye which, it appeared to me, needed the ministrations of some good raw steak to save him from becoming temporarily blind.
“Now that I’ve relieved myself, I feel better,” I informed him.
“Didn’t think you had it in you,” he barked, his ordinarily husky voice deeper than usual. “I thought you lacked a punch—in anything.”
“Your opinion of me was low in all particulars,” I grinned. “As for me, I thought that when your bars were gone you had nothing left.”
“Well, you licked me,” he stated, hate peering forth from the one slit in his face which remained of two eyes. “And I s’pose this is just the start of what I’ll go through. You——”
“Shut up,——you!” I snapped. “That’s about the last time you’ll insinuate that I’m as low as you were when you had a commission, or I’ll put you out of your misery pronto and all you’ll have to worry about is whether you fry in —— or merely stew.”