with but one vulnerable point, the end of his jaw.  David waited and watched for his opportunity as he gave ground slowly.  Twice they circled about the blood-spattered arena, Brokaw following him with leisurely sureness, and yet delaying his attack as if in that steady retreat of his victim he saw torture too satisfying to put an end to at once.  David measured his carelessness, the slow almost unguarded movement of his great body, his unpreparedness for a coup de main—­and like a flash he launched himself forward with all the weight of his body behind his effort.

It missed the other’s jaw by two inches, that catapeltic blow—­striking him full in the mouth, breaking his yellow teeth and smashing his thick lips so that the blood sprang out in a spray over his hairy chest, and as his head rocked backward David followed with a swift left-hander, and a second time missed the jaw with his right—­but drenched his clenched fist in blood.  Out of Brokaw there came a cry that was like the low roar of a beast; a cry that was the most inhuman sound David had ever heard from a human throat, and in an instant he found himself battling not for victory, not for that opportunity he twice had missed, but for his life.  Against that rushing bulk, enraged almost to madness, the ingenuity of his training alone saved him from immediate extinction.  How many times he struck in the 120 seconds following his blow to Brokaw’s mouth he could never have told.  He was red with Brokaw’s blood.  His face was warm with it.  His hands were as if painted, so often did they reach with right and left to Brokaw’s gory visage.  It was like striking at a monstrous thing without the sense of hurt, a fiend that had no brain that blows could sicken, a body that was not a body but an enormity that had strangely taken human form.  Brokaw had struck him once—­only once—­in those two minutes, but blows were not what he feared now.  He was beating himself to pieces, literally beating himself to pieces as a ship might have hammered itself against a reef, and fighting with every breath to keep himself out of the fatal clinch.  His efforts were costing him more than they were costing his antagonist.  Twice he had reached his jaw, twice Brokaw’s head had rocked back on his shoulders—­and then he was there again, closing in on him, grinning, dripping red to the soles of his feet, unconquerable.  Was there no fairness out there beyond the bars of the cage?  Were they all like the man he was fighting—­devils?  An intermission—­only half a minute.  Enough to give him a chance.  The slow, invincible beast he was hammering almost had him as his thoughts wandered.  He only half fended the sledge-like blow that came straight for his face.  He ducked, swung up his guard like lightning, and was saved from death by a miracle.  That blow would have crushed in his face—­killed him.  He knew it.  Brokaw’s huge fist landed against the side of his head and grazed off like a bullet that had struck the slanting surface of a rock.  Yet the force of it was sufficient to send him crashing against the bars—­and down.