morning he was awakened by her lips pressed on
his left hand.

"Hey!--what are you doin'?'" he demanded.

"Kissing Hazel and Hattie good morning," she answered demurely. "And now
I 'm going to kiss you good morning.. .. And just where did your punch
land? Show me."

Billy complied, touching the point of her chin with his knuckles. With
both her hands on his arm, she shored it back and tried to draw it
forward sharply in similitude of a punch. But Billy withstrained her.

"Wait," he said. "You don't want to knock your jaw off. I'll show you. A
quarter of an inch will do."

And at a distance of a quarter of an inch from her chin he administered
the slightest flick of a tap.

On the instant Saxon's brain snapped with a white flash of light, while
her whole body relaxed, numb and weak, volitionless, sad her vision
reeled and blurred. The next instant she was herself again, in her eyes
terror and understanding.

"And it was at a foot that you struck him," she murmured in a voice of
awe.

"Yes, and with the weight of my shoulders behind it," Billy laughed.
"Oh, that's nothing.--Here, let me show you something else."

He searched out her solar plexus, and did no more than snap his middle
finger against it. This time she experienced a simple paralysis,
accompanied by a stoppage of breath, but with a brain and vision
that remained perfectly clear. In a moment, however, all the unwonted
sensations were gone.

"Solar Plexus," Billy elucidated. "Imagine what it's like when the other
fellow lifts a wallop to it all the way from his knees. That's the punch
that won the championship of the world for Bob Fitzsimmons."

Saxon shuddered, then resigned herself to Billy's playful demonstration
of the weak points in the human anatomy. He pressed the tip of a finger
into the middle of her forearm, and she knew excruciating agony. On
either side of her neck, at the base, he dented gently with his thumbs,
and she felt herself quickly growing unconscious.

"That's one of the death touches of the Japs," he told her, and went
on, accompanying grips and holds with a running exposition. "Here's
the toe-hold that Notch defeated Hackenschmidt with. I learned it
from Farmer Burns.--An' here's a half-Nelson.--An' here's you makin'
roughhouse at a dance, an' I 'm the floor manager, an' I gotta put you
out."

One hand grasped her wrist, the other hand passed around and under her
forearm and grasped his own wrist. And at the first hint of