Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/131

 No national belief was ever more charged with error. It is no more natural for an American or a man of any other race to strike straight and true blows with his fists than it is for a cat to kick out backwards like a mule.

Edward and Jepson were average American boys and their zeal to strike each other terrible blows was for some minutes only exceeded by their failure to hit each other at all. They brandished their fists as beetles brandish their antennae, and they leaped about and embraced and swung their arms like windmills. Something or other at the last moment always turned their most terrible blows into pushes. Edward's most painful injury was to his left instep. And it was not the fist but the heavy boot heel of the Jepson boy which caused it. It was the Jepson boy's right elbow which blackened Edward's eye. And it was the top of Edward's head in collision with the Jepson boy's soft stomach which, just as the school bell rang and stopped the sport, sickened the Jepson boy and made him wish that he had allowed Edward to eat his old sandwich in peace.

Through the convenient knothole the fair Alice had observed the insult, the challenge, the disappearance of the combatants behind half-way house and their subsequent reappearance. It was not