The clans were dividing, and a brawl brewing when we got there, and it looked like there was going to be about a five-pronged battle, with perhaps a little side rock-polemics and personal gouging disputations. Ed and I did not know the merits of the question under debate, but in those days the code did not require you to know the mere vulgar details and causes. All you wanted to be certain of was that the other fellows were there. The world should rid itself of the delusion that it requires any especial aggravation to prompt a boy to hit at any head he sees poking up. The first thing I saw, Sam Ramsey had climbed after a particularly red apple that Bob Neeld had claimed the week before, and when he shook it down John Formwalt picked it up and bit it. Fon Feeney, who belonged to a subsection of the Ramsey Rooters, saw the dirty deed, and he smashed John on the jaw with a rotten apple, and Bob grabbed the red apple. A boy does not mind being hit with a pile driver or a club, or being shoved off a house backwards, or shaken out of a tree, in a fair fight; but he despises to be hit with anything soft and rotten. When Fon hit John, Will McEwen made a dive at Fon, but Bob Wilson tripped him up and fell on top, and in rushed eight fellows, looking for an opening. John Formwalt, with rotten apple smeared over his jaw and running down under his shirt, was a terror to see, and here he came making for everybody in sight, but he ran jam against Charlie Fulton’s fist, and stopped to count the stars. Then Matt Neill came frisking up to close the debate, and Willis Bonner landed on Matt’s snoot, and he hunted grass. There was a mighty mixtry along about then of gouging boys, and Sam dropped out of the tree right on top of the Kilkenny bunch and went for every head in sight.