ales turned against the challenger _a l'outrance_.

Banion caught his antagonist by the wrist, and swift as a flash stooped,
turning his own back and drawing the arm of his enemy over his own
shoulder, slightly turned, so that the elbow joint was in peril and so
that the pain must be intense. It was one of the jiu jitsu holds,
discovered independently perhaps at that instant; certainly a new hold
for the wrestling school of the frontier.

Woodhull's seconds saw the look of pain come on his face, saw him wince,
saw him writhe, saw him rise on his toes. Then, with a sudden squatting
heave, Banion cast him full length in front of him, upon his back!
Before he had time to move he was upon him, pinning him down. A growl
came from six observers.

In an ordinary fall a man might have turned, might have escaped. But
Woodhull had planned his own undoing when he had called it free. Eyeless
men, usually old men, in this day brought up talk of the ancient and
horrible warfare of a past generation, when destruction of the adversary
was the one purpose and any means called fair when it was free.

But the seconds of both men raised no hand when they saw the balls of
Will Banion's thumbs pressed against the upper orbit edge of his enemy's
eyes.

"Do you say enough?" panted the victor.

A groan from the helpless man beneath.

"Am I the best man? Can I whip you?" demanded the voice above him, in
the formula prescribed.

"Go on--do it! Pull out his eye!" commanded Bill Jackson savagely. "He
called it free to you! But don't wait!"

But the victor sprang free, stood, dashed the blood from his own eyes,
wavered on his feet.

The hands of his fallen foe were across his eyes. But even as his men
ran in, stooped and drew them away the conqueror exclaimed:

"I'll not! I tell you I won't maim you, free or no free! Get up!"

So Woodhull knew his eyes were spared, whatever might be the pain of the
sore nerves along the socket bone.

He rose to his knees, to his feet, his face ghastly in his own sudden
sense of defeat, the worse for his victor's magnanimity, if such it
might be called. Humiliation was worse than pain. He staggered, sobbing.

"I won't take nothing for a gift from you!"

But now the men stood between them, like and like. Young Jed Wingate
pushed back his man.

"It's done!" said he. "You shan't fight no more with the man that let
you up. You're whipped, and by your own word it'd have been worse!"

He himself handed