I was astonished in spite of all my fighting. It was like felling a huge oak tree with a single blow of an axe. But my astonishment was nothing compared with the bewilderment and the rage of the other youngsters who were there. Hardly a one of them had but felt the arm of Chuck Morris in anger or in play until they had come to look upon him as an invincible hero. They shouldered past me in a wave. They picked him up. They threw water in his face. They called on him to stand up.
“You better leave him lay,” I said. “Because, if he stands up, he’ll get the same thing again. I tell you, no abolitionist can stand in front of a Virginia gentleman.”
I blush a little as I write down these words, chiefly when I think what a real Virginia gentleman would have thought if he had heard the son of Will Dorset rank himself with them. But at that moment I felt strong enough to face Dan Donnelly himself, the big Irish blacksmith who had been a pugilist in England and who had taught me something of the art of the prize ring and filled my ears with tales of its heroes, from the matchless Jem Belcher down.
Then I heard a groan and a shout. The circle of Chuck’s friends was torn apart, and Chuck Morris himself, his long golden hair floating behind his head, rushed out at me. There could not have been a better mark for me. I gave him my right again with such force that my arm turned numb to the shoulder, and a slash of crimson opened under his eye. Though that blow stopped and staggered him, the next minute he fell in on me and gripped me in his long arms. It was as though Uncle Abner had laid his giant hands on me. That bear hug crushed the wind from my body and the confidence out of my mind.
I managed to writhe loose and, bending over, as Dan Donnelly had taught me to do, I jerked both my hands upward with all my might into his body. I had used that trick twenty times before and felt each hand sink sickeningly deep into the stomach of another youngster, gasping, choking. But striking the body of Chuck Morris was like hammering at a log cushioned with wrapped sacks. The force of those punches made my wrists ache, but they did not daunt Chuck Morris. He whipped a long overhand blow into my face. I was not stunned, but the sheer weight of it smashed me to the earth. Before I could stir, he was on me.
“Fair play!” I shouted.
“I’ll give you fair play,” he said and sprang up again.
I rose, lurching low along the ground as Dan Donnelly had taught me to do, so that his ponderous first swing missed me, but the second, as I stood up, caught me fairly under the jaw and knocked me head over heels. That was the end of the fight. I do not mean that the battle stopped at this point, but after that stunning blow my mind was half wrapped in darkness, which lifted long enough now and again to show me my foe and let me get at him with driving fists, a darkness rent with red splashes of lightning and thunderstrokes in my brain as his heavy fists thudded home on me. I was either down on the ground and dragging myself up, or else I was leaning in against his powerful hands like one leaning into a hurricane.
Vaguely I knew that other people had come - all the men in the circle of the wagons, as well as others from the outside. My consciousness was awash with a roar of voices, like the beating of the sea against great rocks.
Friendly hands caught at me, at last. I made out the voice of Chris Hudson shouting: “He’s had enough, Chuck.. .and so have you, by the looks of you.”
“You lie,” I managed to groan. “Lemme at him.”
“All right, young tiger,” said Chris. “But this goes by the ring rules from now on…half a minute between knockdowns …and the first man that fails to come to the scratch at the end of that time …he’s beat. Gregory, you get out your watch….”
His hands pushed me to my feet. I went at the shadowy form of big Chuck Morris. My brain cleared a little. I found myself standing toe to toe with Chuck, exchanging crashing blows. As my senses cleared, I was bewildered by my own skill which, out of the fighting instinct, had kept me weaving my body and head from side to side to dull the snap of his punches, while I drove my own in with more telling effect. He went back. I followed him in the midst of a sudden silence. Then he was down - lost in the blackness at my feet.
The hands of Chris Hudson caught me, and I was dragged down upon his knee. It was the last bright moment of the fight for me. Dull and distant, I saw the swarms of faces, I heard their shouts, I even heard the calling of bets as they laid wagers. Then the voice of Chris was at my ear: “You’ve done enough, Lew. You can stop now, before he smashes you to pieces. There’s no disgrace. He’s older. He weighs forty or fifty pounds more. There’s not a man in the camp would stand up to him with either fists or guns.”
What I answered, I do not know, but I know that the thought of surrender turned me sick and then turned me wild. Time was called. Chris Hudson pushed me to my feet, and Chuck Morris and I lurched together. I felt my hard fists literally splash twice against the running blood on his face. Then before me loomed the huge fist of Morris, striking over and down. It landed, and my knees turned to water.
Still it was not the end, though that blow is absolutely the last that I can recall of the fight. During the rest of the time I must have struggled on through perfectly instinctive motions, but my conscious brain was covered with darkness. Chris Hudson told me later how the struggle went on, with Chuck Morris literally cut to pieces, his feet braced to keep his body from falling, his eyes almost blinded, his face dripping crimson, but still hammering away at my lurching, swaying body until finally, after I had fallen upon my face for the fiftieth time at the end of the half minute, I was a mass of inert flesh in Hudson’s hands.
You will say, as others have said to whom I told this story, that it was a brutal thing for those men to allow the battle to go on between two youngsters, and one so totally overmatched. But those hardy traders knew what they were about. Up to that moment both Chuck Morris and I had been ceaseless bullies. They knew about Chuck and perhaps they guessed about me, as older men usually see through boys with a glance or two. All my life I had gone about hunting for trouble. But after that fight with Morris, though I loved battle as much as ever, I had had my lesson, and I never again hunted trouble. To my knowledge, neither did he, until the combination of events - and something, perhaps, of a predetermined fate - forced him to hunt for me, and find me, and fight with me the most dreadful battle of our lives - except the final fight that is still to come for me and that all men must eventually face.
I wakened into blackness at last. Across my face was a mass of wet cloth, and there was a pungency of some healing salve in my nostrils. I hardly could draw a breath, I was in such agony. Every inch of my body had been battered, strained, crushed. My mouth was swollen, my eyes were closed, and the pain was so dreadful that I prayed for unconsciousness again. I groaned, and Chris Hudson’s voice said rather softly: “He’s coming ‘round. I thought he never would. I thought that we had a dead boy on our hands. Friends, we’ve let this go too far.”
“Bah!” exclaimed Gregory. “It’ll be good for both of ‘em.”
CHUCK FINDS A PAL
The final reason, then, that I left Boonville with that trading caravan was simply because I was unable to help myself. I could not walk; I could not stand. And so I was carted away by those abolitionists. For all of my life - let me confess it - that word has reddened my face with anger, and for a long time it would be my regret that I was unable to come out of the Far West to fight on the side of the Confederacy. I had not yet come to realize that we are a nation subject to passionate fevers, that it is in our very nature always to want to abolish something. After all the killing of the Civil War, the abolitionists declared to the slaves that they were free, and then proceeded to turn their backs on them. Abolition itself is the thing, and about all that ever really matters to the true abolitionist is what he wants to abolish, and damn the human consequences.