stripping. A short distance away lookouts
were set, their task being to watch the lighted ends of the bridge. A
member of the Boo Gang held Martin's coat, and shirt, and cap, ready to
race with them into safety in case the police interfered. Martin watched
himself go into the centre, facing Cheese-Face, and he heard himself say,
as he held up his hand warningly:-

"They ain't no hand-shakin' in this. Understand? They ain't nothin' but
scrap. No throwin' up the sponge. This is a grudge-fight an' it's to a
finish. Understand? Somebody's goin' to get licked."

Cheese-Face wanted to demur,--Martin could see that,--but Cheese-Face's
old perilous pride was touched before the two gangs.

"Aw, come on," he replied. "Wot's the good of chewin' de rag about it?
I'm wit' cheh to de finish."

Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all the glory of
youth, with naked fists, with hatred, with desire to hurt, to maim, to
destroy. All the painful, thousand years' gains of man in his upward
climb through creation were lost. Only the electric light remained, a
milestone on the path of the great human adventure. Martin and Cheese-
Face were two savages, of the stone age, of the squatting place and the
tree refuge. They sank lower and lower into the muddy abyss, back into
the dregs of the raw beginnings of life, striving blindly and chemically,
as atoms strive, as the star-dust if the heavens strives, colliding,
recoiling, and colliding again and eternally again.

"God! We are animals! Brute-beasts!" Martin muttered aloud, as he
watched the progress of the fight. It was to him, with his splendid
power of vision, like gazing into a kinetoscope. He was both onlooker
and participant. His long months of culture and refinement shuddered at
the sight; then the present was blotted out of his consciousness and the
ghosts of the past possessed him, and he was Martin Eden, just returned
from sea and fighting Cheese-Face on the Eighth Street Bridge. He
suffered and toiled and sweated and bled, and exulted when his naked
knuckles smashed home.

They were twin whirlwinds of hatred, revolving about each other
monstrously. The time passed, and the two hostile gangs became very
quiet. They had never witnessed such intensity of ferocity, and they
were awed by it. The two fighters were greater brutes than they. The
first splendid velvet edge of youth and condition wore off, and they
fought more cautiously and deli