We gave our men their arms; and as, stripped to their shirts, they stood apart, awaiting signal to engage, Noah put point to floor, and bearing hard upon the hilt, bent his blade double. Abruptly lifting his hand, the honest steel sprang straight, and the sword was tossed high in the air. As it fell, with the clear, sureness of legerdemain, Noah caught it by the hilt. It was no more than a flourish of the fencing school, perhaps; but it served to hearten me mightily and to put me confident of victory. Neither was it wanting in effect, I may suppose, on the volatile Pigeon-breast and his man, Catron; I thought on their side it made somewhat for a certain seriousness of face. Speaking now of the battle, I must warn you of my inability to tell the tale in nice and hair-line strokes. It was a notable fight, valorously sustained and fairly made; but indubitably it did not remain in one like myself--wholly ignorant of that fencing which pushes or stabs, and admirable with a saber no farther than striking a downright blow with the edge--to catch close work, and taste the merit of it. I have no more of fencing than of Sanscrit, and remember no work, of my own of that character beyond splitting an Indian's head like a pumpkin in a skirmish on the Tombigbee. I am strong of arm, and having the day before come across the long hair of seven white women, murdered at Fort Mimms, smoke-drying in the wigwams of a Creek village we sacked, I doubtless smote upon that savage with uncommon violence. When the pair engaged, there were preliminary moments employed in feeling one another's strength. The swords kept up an incessant thin rasping, with an occasional singing note as they parted company for thrust or parry. Even my uneducated vision observed from the commencement how Noah held the better of it. His address was superior; and I should say that, with a stiffer wrist, he was withal the more falcon-like in assault, and readier of recovery. Catron, by his brow of fury, meant death if he might only clothe his point for it. That was not to be. On the heels of a desperate stroke--it was fellow to a dozen that preceded it--which Noah foiled with blade describing a circle no bigger than a curtain-ring, Catron's flushed cheek faded to ghastly gray. For the moment I thought him touched; but no, it was but the sudden daunting conviction that he had met his master. This, breaking on him like the boom of a death-bell, and how his life stood now naked before one whom he had so provoked, ate the yolk from his courage like a weasel. Catron foresaw his downfall before we who looked on might tell. And if I am to understand a gray, drawn face, then the news taught him the bitterness of death itself.