How many men Bowie killed with the blade that saved his life on the Mississippi sandbar we do not know. Rezin P. Bowie flatly affirmed that the knife never was used more than the once for other than hunting purposes. Maybe Bowie used at other times an improved model, though, as we shall see, he was passionately devoted to “Old Bowie.” Estimates of the number of men he stabbed--exclusive of his work in the Alamo--vary from sixteen to nineteen. It is significant that Rezin was careful to make a distinction between a “difficulty” and a “duel”; consequently his flat assertion that neither he nor James “ever had a _duel_ with any person whatsoever” is to be taken technically. The technically trained Judge Pope, already quoted, overruled, we might say, Rezin’s definition--or assertion. “Several months ago,” he records, “I met a descendant of the Bowies who informed me that his great-uncle James once fought a desperate duel with a Mexican with knives, the combatants, face to face and within mutual striking distance, sitting on a log to which the stout leather breeches each wore were securely nailed.” Bowie was as gallant as he was gory. One time, so another yarn goes, he met in Natchez-Under-the-Hill a young man named Lattimore, whom he recognized as the son of a much esteemed friend. Young Lattimore had sold a large amount of cotton and in a faro game was being cheated by “Bloody Sturdivant,” a notorious gambler. “Young man,” said Bowie, “you don’t know me, but your father does. Here, let me take your hand.” In a short time Bowie exposed the cheat. Then he won back the money Lattimore had lost and gave it to him with the advice to gamble no more. “Bloody Sturdivant,” meantime, ignorant of who his opponent was, had become so incensed that he challenged Bowie to a duel, proposing that they lash their left hands together and fight with knives. Bowie accepted, at the first stroke disabled the right arm of his antagonist, and then forbore to take his life. Duels of this character between men lashed together were not exactly everyday affairs, but the fact that they occurred at all bespeaks the spirit of the times--and the popularity of the Bowie knife. In the region of Texas below San Antonio they were called “Helena duels” from the fact that the town of Helena fostered them rather frequently. Sometimes they were known as “Mexican fights.” More dramatic, perhaps, and certainly as chilling to the imagination, was another form of duel that Bowie is said to have inaugurated. He was challenged, so the story goes, and had the privilege of arranging the combat. He stipulated that the fight should take place at night in a dark room into which the combatants, stripped to the waist, barefooted--so that sound would not reveal movement--and armed with Bowie knives, were to be locked.