Left, right, left, I dug into his middle. He slashed me across the face with forearm and fist, and got clear.
He fed me some more lefts, splitting my lip, spreading my nose, stinging my face from forehead to chin. And when I finally got past that left hand I walked into a right uppercut that came up from his ankle to click on my jaw with a shock that threw me back half a dozen steps.
Keeping after me, he swarmed all over me. The evening air was full of fists. I pushed my feet into the ground and stopped the hurricane with a couple of pokes just above where his shirt ran into his pants.
He copped me with his right again—but not so hard. I laughed at him, remembering that something had clicked in his hand when he landed that uppercut, and plowed into him, hammering at him with both hands.
He got away again—cut me up with his left. I smothered his left arm with my right, hung on to it, and whaled him with my own left, keeping them low. His right banged into me. I let it bang. It was dead.
He nailed me once more before the fight ended—with a high straight left that smoked as it came. I managed to keep my feet under me, and the rest of it wasn’t so bad. He chopped me a lot more, but his steam was gone.
He went down after a while, from an accumulation of punches rather than from any especial one, and couldn’t get up.
His face didn’t have a mark on it that I was responsible for. Mine must have looked as if it had been run through a grinder.
“Maybe I ought to wash up before we eat,” I said to Milk River as I took my coat and gun.
“Hell, yes!” he agreed, staring at my face.