The boy had drawn apart to work upon a rime in a notebook. He found no recreation in sitting around the edge of the yard listening to cheap opinion, telling off-color stories, pitching horseshoes or flipping pennies. In a warm spot in the sunshine he worked upon a new poem which he had titled “Girl-Without-a-Name.” One Silas Plumb stole up and snatched the notebook from him. Worse and more mortifying, Si headed back for his fellow laborers. Noting that what he had snatched was poetry, he was seized with unholy glee. Disregarding Nathan’s cries of anger, Plumb leaped on a crate and dramatically began to “elocute”— “Listen, fellers! This is rich! Poetry! Listen! ‘You came to me in my dreams last night, Dear Girl-Without-a-Name——” Blind, unreasoning rage boiled upward through Nathan. Chagrin and indignation fired every nerve in the boy’s body to murderous retaliation. Plumb was a heavy-footed, rumple-clothed, corn-fed son of a typical Vermont small town. He was blue-eyed, shocky-headed, red-cheeked and three years Nathan’s senior. But to have the innermost privacies of his romantic soul ballyhooed for the bucolic ribaldry and bovine amusement of the tannery men was like maddening vitriol poured on Nat’s naked flesh. He lurched for the notebook and when Si held on, Nathan struck him the hardest smash in the face he had ever received in his life. Si held his sickly grin for about ten seconds. Then it froze on his mouth. He spat out blood and teeth. Purple rage flooded his features. “I’m goin’ to get you for that!” he swore. He dropped off his coat, smeared his bloody mouth with the back of his big hand and fell into clumsy fighting posture. Loafers in the tannery came a-running. Nathan was pale but resolute. Silas struck him. Stung to fury, Nathan hit back twice. The epochal battle began. That battle was tannery talk for weeks, for months, for years. “Si had the punch to push his dukes through the side of a plank fence,” a local enthusiast described it afterward. “But young Forge hit him three times and run around him twice while Si was makin’ up his mind where he’d hit once.” Back and forth across the enclosure the two youths struggled, upsetting boxes, knocking down hides, tripping on yard refuse, falling backward into the circle of wildly applauding spectators. Great pile-driver blows the larger fellow smashed at his lighter opponent. Nathan’s counter-attack was swift and rapier-keen, taking the other by surprise, getting inside his defenses, smashing his nose, closing his eyes, lacerating his lips, but always lacking the bodily weight to strike the other down or finish him off with a knock-out. There is something vitally fine and fair in an American crowd. It wants to see the under dog get the best of it. Nathan, because of his slenderness, was the under dog. Si sensed that the moral support of the tanners was not with him. He grew Germanically furious.