“Meester Fleent!  For God’s love, save my man, Meester Flint!” Michael’s wife Katya screamed at him.

By way of answer Meester Fleent very deliberately handed her his eye-glasses.  Then one saw that his eyes, slitted in his head, were cold and bright as a snake’s; his chin thrust forward, and in his red beard his lips made a straight line like a clean knife-cut.  Two bright red spots had jumped into his tanned cheeks.  His lean hands balled.

He said no word; but the crumpled thing that was Michael was of a sudden plucked bodily out of Big Jan’s hands and thrust into the waiting woman’s.  The astonished Boss found himself confronting a pale and formidable face with a pair of eyes like glinting sword-blades.

Kerry had followed his master, and was now close to his side.  For the moment Flint had forgotten him.  But Big Jan’s evil eyes caught sight of him.  He knew the Butterfly Man’s dog very well.  He snickered.  A huge foot shot out, there was a howl of anguish and astonishment, and Kerry went flying through the air as if shot from a catapult.

“So!” Jan grunted like a satisfied hog, “I feex you like that in one meenute, me.”

The red jumped from John Flint’s cheeks to his eyes, and stayed there.  Why, this hulking brute had hurt Kerry! His breath exhaled in a whistling sigh.  He seemed to coil himself together; with a tiger-leap he launched himself at the great hulk before him.  It went down.  It had to.

I know every detail of that historic fight.  Is it not written large in the Book of the Deeds of Appleboro, and have I not heard it by word of mouth from many a raving eye-witness?  Does not Dr. Walter Westmoreland lick his lips over it unto this day?

A long groaning sigh went up from the onlookers.  Meester Fleent was a great and a good man; but he was a crippled man.  Death was very close to him.

Big Jan was not too drunk to fight savagely, but he was in a most horrible rage, and this weakened him.  He meant to kill this impudent fellow who had taken Michael away from him before he had half-finished with him.  But first he would break every bone in the crippled man’s body, take him in his hands and break his back over one knee as one does a slat.  A man with one leg to balk him, Big Jan?  That called for a killing.  Jan had no faintest idea he might not be able to make good this pleasant intention.

It was a stupendous fight, a Homeric fight, a fight against odds, which has become a town tradition.  If Jan was formidable, a veritable bison, his opponent was no cringing workman scared out of his wits and too timid to defend himself.  John Flint knew his own weakness, knew what he could expect at Jan’s hands, and it made him cool, collected, wary, and deadly.  He was no more the mild-mannered, soft-spoken Butterfly Man, but another and a more primal creature, fighting for his life.  Big Jan, indeed, fancied he had nobody but the Butterfly Man to deal with; as a matter of fact he was tackling Slippy McGee.