Then Cluett struck. It was not like a blow--it was more like a shot. That is to say, one saw nothing of the travelling fist: merely noticed the effect, in a red which grew between the stranger's lips, until it ran down in a long thin trickle over his bulldoggy chin. "Gosh all jew's-harps!" monologued the tautened Miss Yockley, who did not seem gratified, "Nick missed him. That was meant for the point of the jaw. Would have been a K. O., too, if it had gone where it was looking. But ou-wouch!" This last as the masked man's shoulders, gleaming white under the electric arcs, see-sawed flashingly. With apparently no visible reason for the movement, Nick Cluett's head rocked. The gong sounded, closing Round One. "Jiminy!" Miss Stella said, "watch Bob!" For Mr. Masterman was rushing to and fro, as the saying goes, "like a hen on a hot griddle". Talking and gesticulating to the referee--dashing over and shaking his fist in the face of the masked man who leaned back calmly in his stool while his seconds sponged his mouth--then hurrying back and whispering like a soda fountain in the ear of the champion, who reclined against the ropes that stretched behind his seat, restoring himself by deep inhalations and smiling crookedly at his manager's ecstasy of anxiety. "That mask has got to come off!" Bob Masterman yelled, dashing over again to the referee, "or out of this comes my man. He can fight anything with a face on, but he ain't used to pounding away at a mask." "Why don't you mask your man, then?" demanded one of the stranger's seconds, who both also wore masks, one red, one black; "That will even things." "Mask nothing," grunted the monosyllabic Mr. Cluett, sitting up in preparation for the gong; "Beat it, Bob. Keep shirt on. 'M all right." Round Two commenced with the house, crowded from orchestra pit to gallery, watching in a silence unbroken except for an intermittent creak or cough. Even the light sound of the fighters' shoes on the ring-canvas was audible in seats half-way to the back of the big auditorium. Mr. Masterman, fists clenched in the side-pockets of his coat, feet squared aggressively on the floor, face thrust forward, watched the movements of both men with as much intentness as though he were a kind of auxiliary referee. Miss Yockley, sympathetically reflecting Masterman's moods, had lost her nonchalance. Her mouth half-open; her hands locked together and thrust, knuckles up, under her chin; the whites of her eyes showing in a gawky stare: she watched Cluett let the second round go by with only one light left swing to the neck, countered immediately by the masked man with a lightning right which made Nick shake his head and rub the thumb of his glove across his nostrils. Neither blow did any noticeable damage.