There came a sound of footsteps on the path,—that plunging sound of muffled resonance men make in iron-studded raw hide footgear, with also in this case a swishing minor note from the play of the ankle aprons worn by the mill workers. Agnes had never heard any sound like it. Not until two men met and passed in the path, so close that she could smell them, did she quite make out what it was; and by that time her heart was making more noise than the men’s feet. They did not see her. They passed without speaking to each other, which was strange for mill workers; but when they had walked maybe twenty paces in opposite directions one cast a taunt backward over his shoulder. What it was Agnes could not tell. The other answered it. Both stopped. Then she heard them slowly returning. They met again at the same spot where they had passed and stood there looking at each other warily, suspiciously, their eyes rolling in the moonlight. She could see them distinctly, for they were very close, yet as it happened she herself was so concealed that the men, though they might have touched her, did not see her.
One had a very pleasing aspect. He was tall and[149] vibrant with a fine profile and no bristles. That was Alex Thane, the magnificent puddler.
The other was of lower stature, much heavier, massive, in the form of a wedge, with a width at the top across the shoulders that was almost a deformity. He was neckless. His head started from between his shoulders like a gargoyle. Coarse black hair grew all over him. His moustache was like a worn brush. His eyes were wide apart, set very high, denoting enormous animal vitality.
It was he who had cast back the taunt; and it was he with his chin thrust out who spoke first when they met again and stood facing each other in that singular way. He was a Cornishman. What he said Agnes could not understand. Thane answered him in words which, though she knew them as words, most of them, imported to her mind no sense whatever. Still she got the drift of what they were saying, for they said a good deal of it in a universal language more gleaming and subtle than the language of words. She got it from their tones and gestures and what radiated from their eyes. And it was the drift of what men have been saying to each other from the beginning.
First it was, “Which of us can kill the other?”
After a very long time, millions of years maybe, it became, “Which of us could kill the other?”
That was the leap that placed an abyss between man and animal. No creature but man exists on this side. The animals still say can. He says could. It was the beginning of civilization. And all that we have done[150] since has been to elaborate the ways of could, ways to conquer without killing, and to evolve the sporting code in which the potentials of could are standardized. According to that code one may acknowledge that another could have killed him without losing one’s life, one’s self-esteem or one’s social caste.
These two, Thane and the Cornishman, had been egged by their fellows into a state of intense rivalry. They were the most powerful men in the mill. Each in his daily work easily performed feats of strength beyond the power of others, but with this difference, that while Thane exerted himself only now and then for the mere feeling of it and the sooner when no one was watching, the Cornishman exhibited his superiority continuously because his vanity required it, and set a killing pace for the men of his crew. He was brutal and laughed exultingly if one of them dropped.
There was much debate as to which was the better man. A majority inclined to the Cornishman for that he was always and instantly ready to try it out, whereas Thane put every challenge aside, not as if he were afraid but with an air of distaste.
“I’m making no show of myself,” he said.
“Show be damned,” the eggers said. “The man is braggin’ he can do yu. Ain’t that a show?”
No use. He could not be goaded into a public match. Many misunderstood it. The Cornishman particularly was misled. He got the notion that Thane was afraid of him, and so he became arrogant and offensive.
[151]
This is what had been going on for some time. It was what was going on now in the path to the great wonder of a special, fascinated audience of one.
The Cornishman, jutting his chin piece further and further out, did the boasting. Thane answered him with contemptuous looks and now and then a derisive word. Suddenly they brought it to a head. As with one impulse they walked a little apart, put down their dinner baskets, threw off their caps and slipped out of their shirts. This seemed all one movement. Then, facing at the same instant, they drew slowly together. Their bodies, nude to the middle, were crouched in a manner that gave Agnes a new and terrific sensation of the human form, especially of its splendid, destructive power. Each had his left arm upraised and bent, as if to guard his face and head, and in their eyes the lust of combat glistened.
Agnes was transfixed with horror and at the same time thrilled as she had never been thrilled in her life before. No excitement she had ever imagined, waking or dreaming, was remotely comparable to this. She perhaps could not have run if she had tried; she would not have tried if she had thought of it. She thought of nothing. She sat perfectly still, her mouth hard set, her hands clenched, a look in her eyes she would not have believed in her own mirror.
The fighters seemed to pursue each other slowly in a small circle, eye to eye, sparring a little, and Agnes gasped with delight. They moved with the fluid ease and unconscious grace of leopards, and gave the same[152] impression of tense coiled strength. She had not the faintest idea hitherto that the man thing could be like this.
Then, so swiftly that she did not see it, the first clean blow went in, with the sound of a butcher’s cleaver falling on the block. The effect of that sound upon Agnes was tremendous. She felt a swooning of worlds in the pit of her stomach. Solids were fluid. Her moorings gave way. Nothing in her experience of men had prepared her for the possibility of this. She had seen below the surface. The surface would never be the same again. What an awful sound! She felt she could not bear to hear it again; yet she listened for it breathlessly, frantically.
She saw blood on the tall one’s face. That did not make her sick. It made her violently partisan. She has been so all the time without knowing it. Thought of the heavy brute winning was intolerable. She could not see his face distinctly, for he crouched much lower than his antagonist and looked out from under his shaggy eyebrows, thus presenting the top of his head. When by accident, however, his face did come into full view she was relieved to see that he was bleeding freely. The tall one in fact was not bleeding at all. It was the other’s blood transferred to him. And then, as she saw how it was really going, she beat her knees with her fists and could hardly restrain the impulse to cry out.
The Cornishman was Thane’s equal in strength and vitality and forced the fighting at first with ferocious[153] onsets. But he was as a bull against a tiger. His blows, falling short or going wild, landed always where his enemy precisely was not. Thane, doing it thoughtfully, planted his blows unerringly. He let the Cornishman come to him so long as he would and simply cut him to pieces, keeping some of himself all the time in reserve.
The end came in that instant when Thane really exerted himself. The Cornishman changed his tactics. He stopped lunging, stood on the defensive, and waited for Thane to come to him.
In this attitude it happened that the Cornishman’s back was to Agnes, not squarely, but only slightly oblique. Therefore, she had a fair full view of Thane as he came toward the Cornishman. The cool, easy purposefulness of him agitated her in a most extraordinary way. She knew he had won.
He walked straight into the Cornishman’s guard and without any feint or pass he did two things at once with such amazing swiftness that the eye could not follow. With his left hand he put aside the Cornishman’s defending arm and with his right he hit him, on the point of his offensive chin, a blow the sound of which was like the snapping of a great tree trunk on the knee of a windstorm.
For an instant nothing happened, except that Thane folded his arms and stood looking seriously at the Cornishman. Then the Cornishman’s arms fell, his form swayed, and he began to go around in a circle, faster and faster, as if one leg at each step became[154] shorter and was letting him down in spite of his efforts to overtake his balance. He was going to fall. Where?
The battle had taken place all at one side of the path where a level space was. From the other side of the path, where Agnes was, the ground pitched off. The stone on which she sat was two feet below the level of the path. The grass concealed her head.
The spinning Cornishman was almost in the path, directly above her. It seemed probable that he would fall in a heap, pitching forward. It was incredible that he should catch himself up; yet he did it with a mighty effort, stopped spinning, stood upright for a moment, then unexpectedly toppled backward over the edge of the path and fell with all his weight upon Agnes.
She screamed and tried to parry the awful mass. It bore her under and she rolled with it a little distance down the hillside. Before she was free of it she saw above her the face of Thane, white and scared.
He picked her up, all of her, bodily, as if she were a doll, carried her back to the path, and stood her on end experimentally.
“Hurt?”
“No,” she said, grimacing with pain.
“You are,” he said. “Let’s see you stand up.”
He let go of her and she began to go over.
“My ankle,” she said. “It got a little twist. Let me sit down.”
Having lowered her gently to a sitting posture he got down on his knees and regarded her anxiously.
“That all? Just the ankle?”
[155]
“I’ll be all right in a minute or two,” she said. Pointing to the vanquished lump she asked: “What about him?”
“That?” he said. “Don’t worry. It ain’t dead. It’ll come to after a bit.”
Her breath was in her throat and her mind was filled with after images of the event. She was still outside of herself with excitement.
“I was on your side,” she said na?vely. Some secret thought then touched her and she doubled up with a tickled sound. Her suppressed feelings were exploding.
Thane at that moment realized that she had witnessed the fight. Next he became painfully conscious of himself. He felt a burning sensation from his middle to the roots of his hair; and as he rose and went looking in the grass for his shirt his movements were awkward, almost clumsy. Having found his shirt he walked a long way off to put it on. When he returned he had the Cornishman’s shirt. That hulk of vanity was beginning to stir as from a deep sleep. Thane helped him to his feet, set him in the path with his face averted, put the garment in his hands, and earnestly desired him to disappear.
Then he stood looking down at Agnes. A moment before they had been as free and natural as children. Now they were false, self-embarrassed.
“How is it now?” he asked.
“Better,” she said.
Silence.
“Maybe you could rub it.”
[156]
“It’s getting all right,” she said.
More silence.
“My name is Alexander.”
“My name is Agnes,” she replied.
Silence again.
“Agnes what?”
“Gib,” she said.
“You old Enoch’s girl?” he asked.
She did not answer.
“Was you cuttin’ it?” he asked.
“Was I what?”
“Givin’ ’im the slip?”
“I’m on my way home,” she said. “Please don’t bother any more about me. I’m quite all right now.”
Her manner had changed. Her tone was formal and dismissive. Thane moved away from her, uncertain what to do, looked about in the grass for his lunch basket, found it, stood for some minutes twirling it in his hands, and slowly came back.
“Better’d let me take you home.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I know my way home.”
“It ain’t no place for you out here. Them from the mill is all right, but these new miners, they go back ’n forwards singing and fighting. They’d scare you most to death ... or worse.”
She was looking off into the valley and made no reply.
“Better’d let me take you home.”
“Please,” she said, “I don’t wish to be taken home.”
“Ain’t you got to go home?”
[157]
To this her only answer was an exasperated shrug of the shoulders. All he could see of her was the expression of her back and it was so unfriendly that it took everything out of him but the doggedness. He waited until it was evident she did not mean to speak again. Then he walked about in a fumble of perplexity and at length threw himself on the grass and comfortably lighted his pipe.
After a while she spoke without turning her head.
“Are you there for the night?”
“Jus’ standing by,” he said. “Can’t leave you here like you was a cripple bird.”
Agnes was secretly entertained. She had also a feeling of being wonderfully safe. Yet the absurdity of her predicament filled her with chagrin. She hated to be helpless. “I can walk,” she said to herself. “I will.”
She got up, took one step bravely and came down ag............