Accordingly, to play off his cunning device, he provoked his antagonist to a push of unusual vigor; when, still within each other's arms, down came the giant warriors, with an appalling squelch, to the ground--the red above, the black below. But in a twinkling there was a Titanic flounce, when behold, the black was above, the red below. Planting his knee with crushing weight on the breast of his prostrate foe, the Fighting Nigger felt for his knife with which to deal the final blow, but found that in the struggle it had slipped from its sheath; and when he would have seized and used the Indian's, that too was gone, lost in like manner. Glancing round for some murderous stone or club, he spied his ax, where it lay on the ground not three feet off to his right, and tickling himself with the thought, with the lucky chance thus offered of giving his work the finishing touch in tip-top style, he eagerly reached out to gather it up; but before he could do so and regain his perpendicular, the wary savage, snatching at his opportunity, gave in his turn a Titanic flounce, which sent the already uplifted weapon with a side-long fling into the air, and brought his foe the second time to the earth. In a trice, however, the wheel of fortune had made another turn, not only bringing the black again to the top, but both black and red clean over the brink of the hill, whence, as elsewhere noticed, its grassy slope sunk steeply but smoothly down to the edge of the river, there ending in an overleaning bank twenty feet high.