Round after round Tom came up, with dogged determination written in his unscarred face, relying upon the same tactics, attacking first one eye and then the other until Heenan was rapidly getting blind. Then came a dastardly act. The American, having got Sayers’ head in chancery under his left arm, twisted his right round the rope of the ring and with the purchase so gained tried to strangle Tom, who struck out at him gamely, but was unable to break loose. He was getting black in the face when the umpires cut the rope. It was a mean and a cruel trick and was practically the last act of a fight in which Sayers had all the honours. The end was at hand. For some time past a blue cloud of policemen had been hovering in the distance without attempting to interfere. Heenan’s backers saw their chance, the ring was broken into by the Americans, the police, seeing that matters were taking a nasty turn, rushed in, and the ring became a seething mass of surging, pushing, scrambling men, the principals trying in vain to continue a fight in the midst of what was now a mere angry, howling mob. As for Heenan, so blind was he that he struck his own second, and it was also said that he hit Sayers when the latter was sitting on his second’s knee. A foul was claimed, but it was not possible for the referee to act in such a tumult, or, indeed, to see. There was a general stampede for the train. Heenan could no longer see and had to be led by two men. There was a little quick-set hedge over which Tom Sayers flew as gaily as a bird. Heenan was in some fashion pushed or dragged through it, a helpless “man-mountain,” so mauled that he was scarcely human. Barring his disabled arm, Tom seemed none the worse; his face hardly showed a scratch. There can be no reasonable doubt that if Heenan’s friends, seeing his plight, had not forced their way inside the ropes and broken up the ring, five more minutes must inevitably have given Tom Sayers a glorious victory. As it was, the mere fact that he, one-armed and inferior in height, weight and reach to an adversary who looked fit to crush him, should only have lost his chance owing to a dirty trick, was simply marvellous. It was an exhibition of bulldog courage which in its way will probably never be beaten. One thing should in justice be recorded. Heenan’s backers behaved badly, but they were a very low class, and I am bound to say that I did not see a single American gentleman among them. The men whom I knew afterwards in New York would have been as disgusted as I was.