Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/162

 another tooth and nail let us draw the curtain. All boyhood, it is true, is sternly competitive; all boyhood is an eternal arena for the testing of muscle and wit. But life's sternest battles, alas, are not fought with fists. So why describe the sparring and dodging and rolling and twisting, the gasping and puffing and writhing?

Suffice it to record that Lonely, feeling still confident of his powers, beheld Annie Eliza emerge timidly from her gate, and fearing the fray might end before her arrival on the field of action, held off for a temporizing moment or two. His reward for this was a prodigious punch on the nose, which, naturally enough, started that organ bleeding profusely, and through the tears that it brought to his eyes, sadly interfered with his sight. This fact Piggie took immediate advantage of, with three quickly repeated home-thrusts. Lonely, under these, felt his cold, pitiless purpose suddenly buried beneath a shower of falling stars. He struck out blindly and wildly; he felt the blows still raining mercilessly in on him; he made a last grim effort to land one of his often-vaunted Cowansburg upper-cuts, utterly failed in this,