His lunge was vicious, but in his contempt for his adversary it was wholly unguarded. A woodsman's rules of battle are simple. They can be reduced to the single precept: Do your man! Knuckles, butting head, a kick like a game-cock with the spiked boots, grappling and choking--not one is called unfair. MacLeod simply threw himself at his foe. It was blood-lust panting for the clutch of him. Those who told it afterwards always regretfully said it was not a fight--not a fight as the woods looks at such diversions. No one who saw it knew just how it happened. They simply saw that it had happened. [Illustration: "WADE STOOD ABOVE THE FALLEN FOE"] To the former football centre of Burton it was an opening simple as "the fool's gambit" in chess. His tense arms shot forward, his hands clasped the wrists of the flying giant with snaps like a steel trap's clutch, his head hunched between his shoulders, he went down and forward, tugging at the wrists, and by his own momentum MacLeod made his helpless somersault over the college man's broad back. And as he whirled, up lunged the shoulders in a mighty heave, and the woodsman fell ten feet away--fell with the soggy, inert, bone-cracking thud that brings a groan involuntarily from spectators. He lay where he fell, quivered after a moment, rolled, and his right arm twisted under his body in sickening fashion. The girl gave a sharp cry, gathered her skirts about her, and ran away up the street. "He's got it!" said 'Liah Belmore, with the professional decisiveness of the "It-'ll-git-ye Club." "I've read about them things bein' done by the Dagoes in furrin' parts," remarked Martin McCrackin, gazing pensively on the prostrate boss, "but I never expected to see it done in a woods fight." There was silence then for a moment--a silence so profound that the breathing of the spectators could be heard above the summer-quieted murmur of the Hulling Machine. Wade walked over and stood above the fallen foe. He was not gainsaid. Woods decorum forbids interference in a fair fight. As he stood there a rather tempestuous arrival broke the tenseness of the situation. From the mouth of a woods road leading into the tangled mat of forest at the foot of Tumbledick came a little white stallion drawing a muddy gig. Under the seat swung a battered tin pail in which smouldered dry fungi, giving off a trail of smoke behind--the smudge pail designed to rout the black-flies of summer and the "minges" of the later season. An old man drove--an old man, whose long white hair fluttered from under a tall, pointed, visorless wool cap with a knitted knob on its apex. Whiskers, parted by his onrush, streamed past his ears. He pulled up so suddenly in front of Ide's store that his little stallion skated along in the dust. "Hullo," he chirped, cocking his head to peer, "Cole MacLeod down!" He whirled, leaped off the back of the seat, and ran nimbly to the prostrate figure.