as you can, and one of us will take him on afterwards.'

But I just heard him and that was all. It was to be my first fight
since I was a boy, but, somehow, I felt cool about it -- sort of dulled.
If the chaps had known all they would have set me down as a cur.
I thought of that, but it didn't make any difference with me then;
I knew it was a thing they couldn't understand. I knew I was reckoned
pretty soft. But I knew one thing that they didn't know.
I knew that it was going to be a fight to a finish, one way or the other.
I had more brains and imagination than the rest put together,
and I suppose that that was the real cause of most of my trouble.
I kept saying to myself, `You'll have to go through with it now, Joe, old man!
It's the turning-point of your life.' If I won the fight,
I'd set to work and win Mary; if I lost, I'd leave the district for ever.
A man thinks a lot in a flash sometimes; I used to get excited
over little things, because of the very paltriness of them,
but I was mostly cool in a crisis -- Jack was the reverse. I looked ahead:
I wouldn't be able to marry a girl who could look back and remember
when her husband was beaten by another man -- no matter what sort of brute
the other man was.

I never in my life felt so cool about a thing. Jack kept
whispering instructions, and showing with his hands, up to the last moment,
but it was all lost on me.

Looking back, I think there was a bit of romance about it:
Mary singing under the vines to amuse a Jackaroo dude, and a coward
going down to the river in the moonlight to fight for her.

It was very quiet in the little moonlit flat by the river.