But the girl, to his surprise, stood still and looked past him over his shoulder.  Van Bibber motioned again for her to pass on, and then, as she still hesitated, turned and glanced behind him.  The street had the blue-black look of a New York street at night.  There was not a lighted window in the block.  It seemed to have grown suddenly more silent and dirty and desolate-looking.  He could see the glow of the elevated station at Allen Street, and it seemed fully a half-mile away.  Save for the girl and the groaning fool on the stoop, and the three figures closing in on him, he was quite alone.  The foremost of the three men stopped running, and came up briskly with his finger held interrogatively in front of him.  He stopped when it was within a foot of Van Bibber’s face.

“Are you looking for a fight?” he asked.

There was enough of the element of the sport in Van Bibber to enable him to recognize the same element in the young man before him.  He knew that this was no whimpering blackguard who followed women into side streets to insult them; this was one of the purest specimens of the tough of the East-Side water-front, and he and his companions would fight as readily as Van Bibber would smoke—­and they would not fight fair.  The adventure had taken on a grim and serious turn, and Van Bibber gave an imperceptible shrug and a barely audible exclamation of disgust as he accepted it.

“Because,” continued his new opponent with business-like briskness, “if you’re looking for a fight, you can set right to me.  You needn’t think you can come down here and run things—­you—­” He followed this with an easy roll of oaths, intended to goad his victim into action.

A reformed prize-fighter had once told Van Bibber that there were six rules to observe in a street fight.  He said he had forgotten the first five, but the sixth one was to strike first.  Van Bibber turned his head towards Miss Cuyler.  “You had better run,” he said, over his shoulder; and then, turning quickly, he brought his left fist, with all the strength and weight of his arm and body back of it, against the end of the new-comer’s chin.

This is a most effective blow.  This is so because the lower jaw is anatomically loose; and when it is struck heavily, it turns and jars the brain, and the man who is struck feels as though the man who struck him had opened the top of his skull and taken his brains in his hand and wrenched them as a brakeman wrenches a brake.  If you shut your teeth hard, and rap the tip of your chin sharply with your knuckles, you can get an idea of how effective this is when multiplied by an arm and all the muscles of a shoulder.

The man threw up his arms and went over backwards, groping blindly with his hands.

Van Bibber heard a sharp rapping behind him frequently repeated; he could not turn to see what it was, for one of the remaining men was engaging him in front, and the other was kicking at his knee-cap, and striking at his head from behind.  He was no longer cool; he was grandly and viciously excited; and, rushing past his opponent, he caught him over his hip with his left arm across his breast, and so tossed him, using his hip for a lever.