"You run," says one fellow to me. "We'll hold him." But hanged if I was going to run. My thoughts was a mix, as usual in such cases—most of it hardly thinking at all, and the rest a kind of white-hot wish to damage something, and a desire to hustle away from there before I got hurt. Then, too, it had reached the limit about Miss Hitty—I sure wasn't going to stand hearing her name mishandled by tavern loafers. Yet the principal cause for my staying was my anxiety to leave. That big, bellowing Irishman, dragging a half-dozen men to get at me, blood streaming down his face, and his expression far from agreeable, put a crimp in my soul, and don't you forget it. But I understood that this was my first man's-size proposition, and if I didn't take my licking like a man I never could properly respect myself afterward. So whilst my legs were pleading, "Come, Willie, let's trot and see mother—it will be pleasanter," I raked my system for sand and stood pat.

I knew a trick or two about assaulting your fellow-man as well as Mick, when you come to that. Fighting is really as good an education for fighting as sparring is, and perhaps a little better. It ain't so much a question of how you make your props and parries, as how much damage you inflict upon the party of the second part.

"Let him come!" I says. "What you holding him for, 's if he was a ragin' lion or something? Let go of him!"

"You skip, you darn fool," says my first friend. "He'll eat you raw."

"Well, it will be my funeral," I says. "If you will see he don't put me down and gouge my eye out, I'll take him as he comes."

Gouging was a great trick with that gang,—I feared it more than death itself.

Just at that minute old Eli drove up. "What in tarnation's this?" says he. When he found out, he tried to make me go home, but all this advice I didn't want had made me more determined. I got crying mad. "Gol-ding it all to thunder!" says I, hopping up and down. "You see me fair play and turn him loose, Eli. I want one more swat at him,—just let me hit him once more, and I'll go home."

Eli was a tall, round-shouldered man, who looked like a cross between a prosperous minister and a busted lawyer. He had a consumptive cough, and an easy, smoothing way with his hands, always sort of apologizing. Several men had been led astray by these appearances, and picked a quarrel with Eli. Two weeks in bed was the average for making that mistake.

He 

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