“You button up your mouth, Marston,” I told him grimly. “Don’t judge me or any other man by your own standards. I don’t even want to kid myself by pretending that I could ride you all summer for personal reasons and then excuse myself by saying that you need discipline. I wouldn’t be that low, but that’s what you did. Get that shirt off, if you want to, and put up your hands. The personal representative of several thousand cadets whose lives you made miserable, including several dozen that you got kicked out entirely, is standing right in front of you.”
“And is going to get the beating of his life!” bellowed Marston suddenly.
He tore off his O. D. shirt as if possessed. All the accumulated bitterness of the last couple of years, I imagine, added to the natural meanness in him, broke through the dam and turned him into a fighting fool.
He weighed as much as I did, but I was a foot taller and my reach was many inches greater than his. As he came toward me joyfully he sent his powerful, stocky body at me like a cannon ball. I sidestepped, and got in a peach right to the button.
It is not my intention to give a round-by-round story of the battle. I couldn’t. It was too fast and much too furious. We were fighting, remember, in a little tool-room, impeded by toolchests, and with rows of shelves around the walls filled with wrenches, cotter pins and all sorts of spare parts. I didn’t have room enough to dance around and keep him out of reach, and he took blow after blow in order to get into very close quarters.
I floored him in the first ten seconds, but he was back on his feet as if he’d bounced off the floor. Once again he came hurtling in, and again I dropped him. His nose was bleeding profusely, not to say fluently by that time, but he was strong as a bull. The next time in he ducked a hurried right swing which I started from the floor, and the next instant we went crashing against the shelves. With a powerful heave he threw me to the floor, and for about a half minute we fought like wildcats all over the place. He used his feet, too, but luckily I got out of his gorilla-like grip in time and up to my feet.
The next minute or so is just a crimson-tinted haze as far as I’m concerned. We stood toe to toe and swapped blows. Twice he got me to the floor again, and in a brief interval when I kept him away from me, I floored him once more.
He came up more slowly, and I leaped in with a one-two punch that I traded for a trip-hammer swing that caught me just under the ear. I went spinning against a tool chest, and fell over it with a crash just as he dropped himself. I was dazed, dizzy, and somewhat, if not entirely, non compos mentis for a moment.
As I tried to clear my head and get to my feet I saw him getting up groggily. Before I could get further than my knees he hurled himself across that tool chest and on top of me, his huge fingers clutching blindly for my throat.