Thorpe was a good boxer, but he knew by now the lumber-jack's
method of fighting,--anything to hurt the other fellow. And in a
genuine old-fashioned knock-down-and-drag-out rough-and-tumble your
woodsman is about the toughest customer to handle you will be likely
to meet. He is brought up on fighting. Nothing pleases him better
than to get drunk and, with a few companions, to embark on an
earnest effort to "clean out" a rival town. And he will accept
cheerfully punishment enough to kill three ordinary men. It takes
one of his kind really to hurt him.

Thorpe, at the first hostile movement, sprang back to the door,
seized one of the three-foot billets of hardwood intended for the
stove, and faced his opponents.

"I don't know which of you boys is coming first," said he quietly,
"but he's going to get it good and plenty."

If the affair had been serious, these men would never have recoiled
before the mere danger of a stick of hardwood. The American woodsman
is afraid of nothing human. But this was a good-natured bit of
foolery, a test of nerve, and there was no object in getting a
broken head for that. The reptilian gentleman alone grumbled at
the abandonment of the attack, mumbling something profane.

"If you hanker for trouble so much," drawled the unexpected voice
of old Jackson from the corner, "mebbe you could put on th' gloves."

The idea was acclaimed. Somebody tossed out a dirty torn old set of
buckskin boxing gloves.