he
onlookers who came pressing from all quarters, drew aside to give them
room to fight.

They began to mix it at a furious pace, both of them sledging heavily,
the advantage of reach and height sparing Morgan much of the heavy
punishment his opponent lacked the cleverness to avoid. While the fellow
doubtless was a champion among the men of his range, he had little
chance against Morgan, imperfect as he was at that game. In a few
minutes of incessant hammering, no breathing spell to break the fierce
encounter, Morgan had chopped the cowboy's face severely. Five times
Morgan knocked him down in less than half as many minutes, the elastic,
enduring fellow coming back each time with admirable courage and vigor.

Morgan's hands were cut from this bare-knuckled mauling, but his
opponent had not landed a damaging blow on his face since the first
unexpected and unguarded one. He could see, from their crowding and
attempts to interfere, that the spirit of fairness had gone out of the
rest of the bunch. An end must be made speedily, or they would climb him
like a pack of wildcats and crush him like a rabbit in a fall. With this
menace plainly before him, Morgan put his best into the rush and wallop
that he meant to finish the fight.

The cowboy's extraordinary resistance broke with the blow; he lay so
long like a dead man where he fell that his comrades brought whisky to
revive him. Presently he struggled to hands and knees, where he stood
coughing blood, Morgan waiting by to see what would follow.

"Take them knucks away from him! he slugged me!" Morgan was amazed to
hear the fellow charge.

"That's not so!" Morgan denied. "Here--search me," he offered, lifting
his arms.

In the code governing personal encounter in those days of the frontier,
which was not so very long ago, just one tick in the great clock of
history, it was permissible to straddle one's enemy when one got him
down, and churn his head against the ground; to gouge out his eyes; to
bite off his ears; to kick him, carve him, mutilate him in various and
unsportsman-like and unspeakable ways. But it was the high crime of the
code to slug him with brass or steel knuckles, commonly called knucks.
The man who carried this reenforcement for the natural fist in his
pocket and used it in a fight was held the lowest of all contemptible
and namelessly vile things. So, these Texas cowboys turned on Morgan at
their comrade's accusation, deaf to any denial, flaming with