Wrestling the tall, mangy, stinking, oily, grimy, gibbering Englishman was something like removing a trash heap from an alley doorway, if the trash heap had arms and legs and a mind to fight you. The truth was Mickey was all done with fighting after killing Old Penny, did not want to strike another soul. But, this fellow did not seem to have a soul!

Blackie Clay was trying to burn the bloody leg stumps of Old Penny’s friend [which was somehow supposed to save the fellow] while the tree-tall, crazed Englishman who had run clean out of his clothes and boot-toes fleeing from the little red men, smashed Fat Sam’s face into the deck—and all Fat Sam did was cry, broken by the evening of murder and death as he was. The skinny man was very tall and had his bony knee in Sam’s lower back, his raggedly booted left foot on the deck, his right hand in Sam’s kinky locks, and the left arm maniacally contorted around the curious looking spiral case of leather.

Mickey failed to pry the hand loose from Sam’s head and heard the poor black boy’s face smash into the deck, which caused the think lips to whimper wetly. This struck a furious chord in his soul and he got his fighting spark back. Mickey sank a screwball punch into the low ribs of the back just above the skinny man’s kidney and heard a welcome snap, accompanied by a heaving gasp and a pause—but the man was back at it, slamming Sam’s face into the deck. Mickey had knocked out old bruisers, vicious young scrappers, and a cow or two—although he did not mess with the bulls—with his fists. His very identity was all bound up in his athleticism and it irked him, even sent him into a rage, to think that this stinking Englishman had not dropped to the deck with that punch!

Mickey flew into his manic rage—his fight-finishing mania that had made him a crowd favorite—and punched left and right for all he was worth into the man’s kidneys.

“Piss blood and die, Englishman!”

The man’s body stiffened from the second punch and stopped moving, there on his knees not much shorter than Mickey, who barely stood five-foot-two. Mickey did not care; had sense only for the wicked drumbeat of the fight. Just now this dirty devil of a man represented the English land-renter who had shipped Mickey and his sisters off on a creaking cart after his mother had died of a broken heart, the English bully sailors who had teased and tormented him on deck during the passage, the nativist boys who had stolen his wee belt on the dock at Baltimore Harbor, and every one of their number that Mickey had since felled in alleys and refuse pits and cellars with brick, bottle, pipe and fist.

The drumbeat of his own pounding fists seemed to mesmerize him. The image of the cavorting fiend who had once been a rich man bounding about cackling as Mickey had slain the hard-fighting red man that obviously had cause to avenge himself on the fleeing white man, danced before his eyes as the beat of the fists now elicited moans, groans, and sickening, fleshy smacks.

The tall man was now sprawled on the deck, all that remained in the world before him, as he beat the long stinking drum that was his shaking body. He felt his own lips curl in a savage snarl as he pounded piss and blood from the dirty man—felt like Mickey ‘The Savage King’ of some dark land. He felt all the more like such a king as the blood splashed up in his eyes and the black fellows danced before him chanting their chant to his grisly drumbeat.

He snarled and beat the harder, never having known true tired at his young age, and daring his body to show it to him now. His blows were coming slower now, but they were harder, hard as ever a scrapper punched in the prize ring. He felt the equal of Old Burke and even Cribb just now as he slowly, willfully altered the beat of his fists to a louder, more crunching, thud.

He thudded into the mess of jelly that had been ribs with his sure right fist and heard “No!”

He then thudded into the water-swelled cushion that had been a kidney with his left fist and heard “No!”

He then pivoted for all that he was worth and sunk his hard right fist into the middle of that bony and malformed back, and heard—even as he felt it most pleasingly—the sickening crack of a spine snapping, just like when BeeBee Philips fell from the roof eve they had been dancing on and snapped his back on the bricks below.

“No, Mickey!! No!”

A dark, red-flaming rage caught fire behind his eyes and he glared at the subjects of his tiny, savage kingdom as they dared to reproach him for serving out just dues.