CHAPTER XIIDid you ever see a rat that was cornered by dogs? It flies in their faces. That was what I done. It wasn’t courage. You don’t call a rat brave.
But I was partly desperate and partly I was mad. I don’t mean angry, but crazy. Just that! The idea that this mite of a kid had deliberately worked up a trap for me to try out my “honor”—why, it was enough to make me laugh all the rest of my days; me being a jail-bird, and the rest of it as I’ve told you before.
I seen a blur of faces, and I jumped at them. The boxing that I had been doing at Fulsom, it made my hands work instinctive. I felt my knuckles bite through flesh to the bone. A pair of them went down, yelling, and tangled up a couple more as they fell, bringing them down at the same time, and I waded along through that gap and
