In the dead of the night they were accompanied to the appointed room in a deserted house. They entered. The door was locked. The seconds outside listened for long minutes without hearing a sound. Then they heard a scuffle, accompanied by a click of steel, a moan, and a voice crying, “Come in.” By the light of a lantern Bowie was seen standing in a pool of blood, the other man dead. Bowie must have lain awake nights thinking up novel ways in which to exercise his knife. It is humiliating to record that in all likelihood he did not think up what might be denominated “the grave duel”--the most exquisite form that hand-to-hand combat with knives could assume. While the noted Clay Allison “of the Washita,” one of the swiftest, boldest, most bizarre and humorous gunfighters of the Southwest, was in Texas along in the early 1870’s he became embroiled, so old-timers tell, with a neighboring ranchman. The two men agreed to fight it out, and the coolness and originality that Clay Allison displayed in planning the details of the fight would have delighted Jim Bowie. “It was agreed,” Maurice G. Fulton relates the story, “that a grave should be prepared of the usual length and width, but to the exceptional depth of seven or eight feet. The two men were to strip themselves to the waist and then seat themselves inside the grave at the two ends, each grasping in his right hand a Bowie knife. At a given signal they were to rise and start fighting. This they were to keep up until one or the other was dead. A final stipulation required the survivor then and there to cover the dead one with the earth removed in digging the grave.” Clay Allison, of the Washita, threw in the dirt. Bowie still had his knife at the Alamo--at least a Bowie knife. Dallas T. Herndon, Arkansas historian, says that he died in the Alamo “with the knife made by James Black clasped in his hand.” Others have said that around Bowie’s cot--for he was ill--was a heap of Mexicans whose ribs had been tickled by the knife. Among the relics in the Alamo itself at present is a not very formidable specimen of cutlery that some man by the name of Bowie donated a few years ago as the original Bowie knife. The Witte Museum, in San Antonio, has another knife that is supposed to have been owned by Bowie and presented by him to a friend. (Bowie seems to have been fond of making presents of the knife, very much as an author presents his own books.) One tradition is that Bowie gave the original knife to the great actor, Forrest. No doubt Bowie admired actors. Another report has it that one of the Louisiana descendants of Rezin P. Bowie lost the original knife in a boggy river some forty years ago.