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Hourly and daily the situation, from Jeff’s point of view, had grown more desperate as Ophelia’s passion for the fascinating sojourner grew. He had even lost his relish for victuals which, with Jeff, was indeed a serious sign. In long periods of self-imposed solitude he had devised and discarded as hopeless various schemes for bringing discomfiture upon his latest and most dangerous rival. For a while he had thought somehow, somewhere, to rake up proofs of the interloper’s former wild and reckless life. But of what avail to do that?

By his own frank avowal the Professor had had a spangled past; had been an adventurer and a wanton, a wandering minstrel bard; had even been in jail. This background of admitted transgressions, now that he was so completely reformed and reclaimed, merely made him an all-the-more attractive figure in the eyes of those to whom he offered confession. Again, Jeff had trifled with a vague design of taunting Fringe into a quarrel and beating him up something scandalous. To this end he tentatively had approached our leading exponent of the art of self-defense and our most dependable sporting authority, one Mr. Jerry Ditto.

Mr. Ditto had grown out of a clerkship at Gus Neihiem’s cigar-store into the realm of fistiana. As a shadow-boxer he excelled; as a bag-puncher also. But in an incautious hour for himself and his backer, Flash Purdy, owner of Purdy’s Dixieland Bar, he had permitted himself to be entered for a match before an athletic club at Louisville against one Max Schorrer, a welter-weight appearing professionally under the nom de puge of Slugging Fogarty. It was to have been a match of twelve rounds, but early in the second round Mr. Ditto suddenly lost all conscious interest in the proceedings.

He retired from the ring after this with a permanent lump on the point of his jaw and a profound conviction that the Lord had made a mistake and drowned the wrong crowd that time at the Red Sea. He fitted up a gymnasium in the old plow factory and gave instructions in sparring to the youth of the town. Naturally, his patronage was all-white, but he offered to take Jeff on for a few strictly private lessons at night provided Jeff would promise not to tell anybody about it. But at last the prospective client drew back. His ways were the ways of peace and diplomacy. Why depart from them? And, anyhow, this Cephus Fringe was so dog-goned sinewy-looking. Playing a saxophone ought to give a man wind and endurance. If not knocked cold in the first onslaught he might become seriously antagonized toward Jeff.

But now, in the sportive fablings of the young white gentleman from up North who was visiting the Enders family, he had found a clue to what he sought. The difficult point, though, was to evolve the plan for the plot nebulously floating about in his brain; for while he envisaged the delectable outcome, the scheme of procedure was as yet entirely without form and substance. It was as though he looked through a tunnel under a hill. At the far end he beheld the sunlight, but all this side of it was utter darkness. Seeking to pluck inspiration out of the air, his roving eye fell upon the dappled rump of Mittie May as she stood in her stall placidly munching provender, and with that, bang! inspiration hit him spang between the eyes.

To look on her, ruminative, ewe-like, fringed of fetlock and deliberate in her customary amblings, you would never have reckoned Mittie May to be a mare with a past. But such was the case. Her youth had been spent in travel over the continent with a tented caravan; in short, a circus. Her broad flat top-side, her dependable gait, her amiable disposition, her color–white with darkish half-moons on shoulder and flank–all these admirably had fitted her for the ring. When, long years before, Hooper’s wagon-shows came to grief in our town Mittie May had been seized by Farrell Brothers to satisfy an unpaid hay-bill.