Then her eyes dragged back to the scene below her.  The men were still sparring; waiting—­as Traill had said—­for the first falling blow to heat their blood to boiling.  At last it fell.  Jim Morrison, in a false moment of vantage, rushed in, head down, arms drawn back like the crank shafts of some unresisting engine, ready to deal the crushing body blows.  Sally’s eyes were wide in a gaping stare.  She expected to see the other fall, waited to hear the grunt of the breath as it crushed out of him.  But it did not come.  She did not try to think how it happened; she only saw Morrison’s head shoot upwards from a blow that seemed to rise from the earth.  For a moment he poised before his man, head lifted, eyes on the second dazed with the concussion.  And then fell Tucker’s second blow—­the heavy lunge of the body, the thump of the right foot as it came down upon the stroke, and the lightning flash of that bare left arm as it shot through the ugly shadows and found its mark.  Sally heard the thud, the void, hollow sound as when the butcher wields his chopper on the naked bone.  She saw one glimpse of the bloody face as it fell out of the circle of light into the shadows that hung about the ground, and the little cry that drove its way between her teeth was drowned by Traill’s exclamatory delight.

“Good left!” he called out excitedly; “follow it up, man!  Follow it up!  Don’t let him forget it!” Through the fogged haze of sensation, in which for the moment she was almost lost, Sally heard the sudden cessation of voices below.  She heard the scurrying of feet and Traill’s low chuckle of ironical laughter.

“It’s all right!” he called to them.  “Go on as far as I’m concerned.  I’m nothing to do with the police.  You know your own job better than I do.  I don’t want to interfere with it.  Go on.”

The voices commenced their chattering again, through which excitement, like a wandering bee, hummed a moving note.

“You won’t make any fuss, will yer, mister?” the master’s voice could be heard saying.

“I?  Make a fuss?  No; why the devil should I?  Go on!”

“Third round!” said the master.

Then for a moment Sally’s eyes opened.  In one of the corners sat Morrison on the knee of an attendant, who was sponging the blood from his face, whilst another flapped a towel before him.  She took a deep breath as he rose slowly to his feet and came forward to meet his man.  Directly the shuffling sound of feet began again, she closed her eyes once more, holding with fingers numbed and cold to the fringe of the curtain beside her.  All the sounds then trooped in pictures before her mind.  When she heard the stamp of the foot, the dull slapping thud of the heavy blow, and the moaning rush of breath, she saw that bleeding face falling out of the sickly lamplight into the sooty shadows.

At last she could bear it no longer.  Her imagination was gloating in her mind over the horrors that it drew.  She forced her eyes to look.  It was better to see the worst than conjure still worse terrors in her mind.  She let her sight rush to those two half-naked bodies; it sped unerringly to the spot like a filing of iron to the magnet’s teeth.