The Argosy, Vol. 84 No. 2 — page 65: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SOUTHWEST “OF THE LAW. saw it draw back for a second upper-cut to his jaw. His senses were reeling; the one impression was that he must take the second blow, that he could not ward it off, that it would finish him. Then the desperation of his rage re- turned; the bitter hate for the monster of cruelty he had learned to regard his op- ponent. He raised his swimming head, bent backward. The blow but grazed his chest in its up- ward lift. To miss a blow is almost as hard on a big man as to take one. Phil- lips did not know how he took advantage of the second in which Haggins regained the perfection of his balance lost on that upward stroke. But he drove his right into the pit of the other’s stomach. Haggins was too well kept up to be knocked out by any such blow even where it struck; but it wrung a grunt from his lips. Phillips’s highly stimulated senses came back enough to perceive the slight relaxation of the grip on his left arm. Some inner voice warned him that his strength would be short-lived, that he must act quickly. But the attempt to fol- low up with a left jab went wrong. Haggins recovered himself, tried to strike again without breaking the clinch, landed a heavy but-ineffectual blow on the flesh of Phillips’s upper arm. Then he flung Phillips off. For several seconds the two giants walked around each other, as big fighters always will, each seeking opportunity to deliver a finishing smash. The sheer rage in each man’s heart could not brook much of that sort of de- lay. The impulse to mix things up seemed to flash on both at once, to affect them alike with utter forgetfulness of de- fense in attempt to hammer each other into jelly. Twice Phillips felt the hard jaw of the other crushing the flesh of his knuckles— felt the pain of that only as joy. Thrice he landed on Haggins’s chest. Once he found again the vulnerable solar plexus. Then he realized the terrific blows he was taking in exchange. He seemed rock- ing back and forth, hammered from one 247 side to the other. His feet were growing unsteady. His hands were numbing. He struck with all the might that seemed spent before he could raise his fist. He could not see where he hit. But Haggins drew back a foot or two. Phillips managed to focus his dizzy vision. The other had but stopped to de- liver the finishing blow at a groggy, help- less opponent. Feebly, Phillips raised his arms to ward it off. Then he saw some- thing else. Through his reeling senses broke the ~“meaning of the swiftly closing circle of the natives about them. Raised clubs, knives, emptied revolvers were rising up. Still the ammonia fumes assisted to clear his brain, though they could no longer lend strength to his heart or his hand. There shot through him a poign- ant sense of moral defeat worse than the physical knock-out which was on its way to his feebly protected face. Haggins had been right. These men needed holding down, needed fear that amounted to terror, needed cruelty of punishment almost inhuman. They stood ever ready to take advantage of the first sign of weakness in a rod of iron. ‘Look out!” he shouted. It was the instinctive assertion of the bond which seems to hold together the Saxon type of white man against all other races of the world, which forgets its own hates and battles at sight of the first hos- tility of men with color in their cheeks. Had Haggins heeded the warning he might have ducked the blow of the big club in the hands of one of the new men he had just brought with him. He went down with a sneer on his lips at what he - had taken as an attempt to throw him off guard by a ruse. His fist landed on Phillips’s chin, even at that, but with the force drawn back as its owner collapsed. Phillips ducked from the similar blow he could not doubt would be dealt him from behind. He felt himself seized, dragged back; he lost his footing, was mauled right» and left, pushed, pressed, COMMICOOOKS (C@