"Make out your check for three hundred, Twinney, and those cups you've got and the two watches in my pocket, every medal and cup I've got at home, my championship gold football--they're yours to keep." "But three hundred dollars!" "Yes, and three thousand if I had your money!" "But what do you want it for?" "Gr-r-r--!" I snarled, and shoved my spread hand into his face. He landed on his back ten feet away. The C.P.O. friend of Meagher's started to smile at me, but before he could get the smile well under way I wiped it off. He fell where he stood. Meagher looked at me and I at him. "That wasn't right," said Meagher. "I'll make it right," I said, "with you or him or whoever else doesn't like it, now or later." He went white; and the kind that go white are finish fighters. And he was a good big man with more than muscle under his coat. "Make it right now," he said. "But not here--some place where the crowd won't be." We moved over to under the grand stand. That was at half past five o'clock and it was a long summer's day, but it took till the daylight was all but gone before I knocked him down for the last time. [Illustration: It took till the daylight was all but gone before I knocked him down for the last time.] He couldn't talk; he couldn't get to his feet. His C.P.O. friend--a game one, too--shook his fist at me across his body. "Only a week out of the hospital and you had to beat him up. But, beaten or not beaten--go ahead, smash me again if you want to, you big brute--he's still a better man than you are or ever will be!" A score of people had found their way in under the seats. None who cared to know but would hear a word of every blow that was passed in that fight. Going home after the fight it was borne in on me that less than ever was I the hero I was wishful to make myself out to be. I slept little that night, and in the morning--nothing within the four walls of a house suited me any more--I slipped out into the sun and walked along the docks; and walking the docks I reached the gates to the navy-yard. I went in. A ship!--'tis like nothing else in the world. Ships! In the romances I'd been reading since ever I could read, there had been tales of ships and of the sea. Phoenician galleys, Roman triremes, the high-prowed boats of the Vikings, carved Spanish caravels--they had carried the men who made history. Great ships were they, and yet here were ships that could take--any one of them here--could take a score, a hundred, of the ancient craft with all their shielded men at arms and stand off--a mile, two miles, ten miles off--and with one broadside blow them from the face of the waters. Dreams of what had been and what might be--what use were they? Things as they are--that was it! What most people, maybe, would call common sense was coming to me; and maybe something finer than all the common sense in the world was flying from me. So I've often thought since of that morning.