“The second round was just like the first, and so was the third. O’Hara kept getting the worst of it. He was knocked down three or four times more, and once, when he’d rushed Rand-Brown against one of the walls, he hit out and missed, and barked his knuckles jolly badly against the wall. That was in the middle of the third round, and Rand-Brown had it all his own way for the rest of the round—for about two minutes, that is to say. He hit O’Hara about all over the shop. I was so jolly keen on O’Hara’s winning, that I had half a mind to call time early, so as to give him time to recover. But I thought it would be a low thing to do, so I gave them their full three minutes.
“Directly they began the fourth round, I noticed that things were going to change a bit. O’Hara had given up his rushing game, and was waiting for his man, and when he came at him he’d put in a hot counter, nearly always at the body. After a bit Rand-Brown began to get cautious, and wouldn’t rush, so the fourth round was the quietest there had been. In the last minute they didn’t hit each other at all. They simply sparred for openings. It was in the fifth round that O’Hara began to forge ahead. About half way through he got in a ripper, right in the wind, which almost doubled Rand-Brown up, and then he started rushing again. Rand-Brown looked awfully bad at the end of the round. Round six was ripping. I never saw two chaps go for each other so. It was one long rally. Then—how it happened I couldn’t see, they were so quick—just as they had been at it a minute and a half, there was a crack, and the next thing I saw was Rand-Brown on the ground, looking beastly. He went down absolutely flat; his heels and head touched the ground at the same time.
“I counted ten out loud in the professional way like they do at the National Sporting Club, you know, and then said ‘O’Hara wins’. I felt an awful swell. After about another half-minute, Rand-Brown was all right again, and he got up and went back to the house with Merrett, and O’Hara and Moriarty went off to Dexter’s, and I gave the ferrets their grub, and cut back to breakfast.”
“Rand-Brown wasn’t at breakfast,” said Harvey.
“No. He went to bed. I wonder what’ll happen. Think there’ll be a row about it?”
“Shouldn’t think so,” said Harvey. “They never do make rows about fights, and neither of them is a prefect, so I don’t see what it matters if they do fight. But, I say—”
“What’s up?”
“I wish,” said Harvey, his voice full of acute regret, “that it had been my turn to feed those ferrets.”
“I don’t,” said Renford cheerfully. “I wouldn’t have missed that mill for something. Hullo, there’s the bell. We’d better run.”
When Trevor called at Seymour’s that afternoon to see Rand-Brown, with a view to challenging him to deadly combat, and found that O’Hara had been before him, he ought to have felt relieved. His actual feeling was one of acute annoyance. It seemed to him that O’Hara had exceeded the limits of friendship. It was all very well for him to take over the Rand-Brown contract, and settle it himself, in order to save Trevor from a very bad quarter of an hour, but Trevor was one of those people who object strongly to the interference of other people in their private business. He sought out O’Hara and complained. Within two minutes O’Hara’s golden eloquence had soothed him and made him view the matter in quite a different light. What O’Hara pointed out was that it was not Trevor’s affair at all, but his own. Who, he asked, had been likely to be damaged most by Rand-Brown’s manoeuvres in connection with the lost bat? Trevor was bound to admit that O’Hara was that person. Very well, then, said O’Hara, then who had a better right to fight Rand-Brown? And Trevor confessed that no one else had a better.