But Johnson got seriously to work in the third round, sent in a hard right-hander to the head, and during a clinch put in two upper-cuts which, however, appeared to do no damage. Jefferies smiled and kept perfectly cool. It would not have been worth while smiling unless he had been hurt just a little. He was boxing well. Oddly enough, despite his long inactivity, many of the spectators observed that he had never boxed better. There were very hard exchanges in the next round, Johnson landing on the ear, Jefferies drawing blood from the mouth. Indeed the white man landed again and again, but he was not the man who had knocked out Bob Fitzsimmons. He did not hit nearly so hard. It is quite likely that his actual boxing was all the better for a long rest and then careful training with many different sparring partners: but hard hitting must be practised constantly, and moreover, it is a virtue which to a less degree than the science of boxing, follows the general trend of a man’s health: and Jefferies had not the constitution he once had. The fifth and sixth rounds consisted mostly of clinching, but at the end of the latter Johnson opened up an old wound on Jefferies’s eyebrow which bled so severely that the blood streamed down his face, and his eye began to close at once. The next round was certainly Johnson’s. A vicious right swing on the side of the head staggered the white man, who was already beginning to lose what little speed he had. Weeks of severe training are made of no avail in an amazingly small number of minutes of hard fighting. Jefferies was hurt, and his way of boxing now showed the onlookers that he was hurt. Johnson, meanwhile, was perfectly cool and boxing easily and well. There were to be no tricks this time, no cruelty of keeping an opponent on his legs so as to hurt him. Jefferies was a harder man than Burns, and Johnson would not take the smallest risk. Was he not “out” to humiliate the whole white race? Had he not said so, and was he not doing it? Of course, to those two men and to ninety per cent. of the onlookers this contest was, as it were, a life and death affair, as important as a minor war. I don’t suppose that it occurred to any one of them that boxing is, when all’s said, a sport, a sort of game, a method of exercise for spare time. Certainly the men were being very highly paid for their “game,” but did that fact alter the essential littleness of the whole thing? No: it was perceived to be a desperate encounter between the white races and the black, and nothing less portentous at all. [Illustration: _Photo: “Sport and General.”_ Jem Driscoll.]