He left her there, and rolling up in his blankets soon fell asleep. It was not often that he dreamed, but on that night his dreams would not let him be. From the very moment that he first slept he seemed to be fighting, fighting with Budge Garside on a platform of creaking boards with a rope barrier round it, lit by hissing naphtha flares. Every moment he grew more exhausted; but he had to go on fighting in spite of the violent jabs of Garside’s fist over his heart. The crowd in the booth, whose faces could not be seen for tobacco smoke, were laughing at him, and this filled him with an angry determination to go through with it. The round seemed endless. He waited for the umpire’s bell to save him, but the umpire had vanished. And now he was fighting all three: Garside with his broad, shaggy chest, the small-headed negro, and the little Jew who skipped about like a flea. He hadn’t bargained to take on all three at once, but there was nobody to whom he could appeal, and so he had to go on boxing as well as he could in this hurricane of six fists. He thought of Alice and the baby whom he had left outside. If he were knocked out, as he surely must be in a moment, she would have to look to herself. That couldn’t be helped. Suddenly he heard her calling from outside the tent: ‘Abner . . . Abner!’ He tried to call back to her, just to show her that he was still keeping up, but no voice would come through his cut lips. Garside landed a terrific blow on the point of his chin. He woke. . . . He supposed he was awake. But the voice that he had heard in his dream still followed him. She was calling ‘Abner . . Abner!’ He tumbled out of bed, pulled on his trousers, and ran downstairs. The mild light of the kitchen dazzled him. In the corner, beyond a pile of overturned furniture, he saw Alice cowering, and above her John Fellows. In the struggle which he had not heard his father had ripped her bodice and torn away the gilt brooch that Abner had given her. Now he had her at his mercy, holding her by the hair, shaking her from time to time like a terrier with a rat and making her scream with pain. Abner had never seen such terror in a human creature’s eyes. When she saw him she cried for his help. ‘Abner . . . Abner . . . make him give over. Tell him I done nothing!’ ‘Abner,’ said John Fellows savagely. ‘Abner . . . there’s a bleedin’ side too much Abner in this ’ouse! You’ll get out of it quick, the pair of you.’ ‘Loose her!’ Abner shouted. ‘Loose her?’ John Fellows laughed. ‘I reckon I’ve let her go too much as it is. Give me the slip, the two of you. Took her off into the woods, tickin’ and tannin’, you dirty devil! Give her joolry! Give your own mother joolry! An’ what happened when I was on my back in the hospital?’ ‘Leave go of her!’ said Abner, coming nearer.