By the eighteenth round they were getting slow. Burke had a primitive ruse which he employed from time to time of looking at his man’s body and grimacing and then bringing up his fist to the head. He tried this now with eminent success. In the next round Byrne received a very hard blow under the ear, not by any means the first, which must have done him more harm than he knew at the moment. He fought back, however, and landed on Burke’s nose and again on the eye, when Burke lowered his hands for a moment to wipe them on his breeches. “Loud laughter at Burke’s expense,” says the writer in _Bell’s Life._ The first knock-down was administered by Byrne in the twenty-seventh round. After that Byrne had distinctly the best of it for some time. He threw Burke with terrific force on his head in the twenty-ninth round and in the next hit him so severely about the body as to make him sick. Burke was evidently weak, and Byrne seemed to have the fight in his hand. He threw his opponent again and again, rushing him to the ropes and hitting him severely before closing. The responsible officials ought now to have stopped the fight, there is no excuse for them whatever. What followed was sheer beastliness and nothing else. Burke and Byrne are in no wise to blame. Both fought until they were virtually senseless. Both tried to be, quite roughly speaking, fair. In the forty-third round Tom Cannon, a well-known bruiser and a backer of Deaf Burke, broke, with others, into the ring and began to curse Burke. “Get up and fight, Deaf ’un,” he shouted. “D’ye mean to make a cross of it?” With some difficulty Cannon and the rest were expelled from the ring, and the fight, if fight it can be called, went on. Both men were now nearly exhausted, but Deaf Burke, urged by his seconds, went in with all his remaining strength and punished Byrne severely. In the forty-ninth round the Irishman came to grass very weak, and Burke became favourite again. And so it went on till the ninety-ninth round, now one and now the other having some slight advantage. Once, his supporters seeing Burke down and apparently unconscious hailed Byrne as the winner: but at the call of time, Dick Curtis, his second, brought Burke up to the scratch, where he stood with indomitable pluck, ready to go on fighting. Byrne’s chances had finally gone when both his hands became so “puffed” that he was unable to strike a single blow which could hurt his opponent, let alone knock him out. Later on, the supporters of the men on either side, apart from their seconds, crowded round them and sprinkled water on them during the progress of the rounds, and fanned them with their hats. And the ring was the centre of pandemonium. The crowd yelled and yelled again for one or other, Burke or Byrne. What cared they that the men had long ago fought themselves to exhaustion, so long as the technical decision was obtained, the decision which would decide the bets?