Daniel O'Thunder. Ian Weir

all. He was champion of England until soft living caught up with him, alas, along with Gentleman Jackson, who seized him by the long dark hair with one hand, and battered him senseless with t’other. The other gentleman,” I added, indicating the picture of Jesus, “I believe you know already. But do you know what the two of them had in common?”

      “They were both warriors,” said Daniel, who had returned in time to hear this question. “They both fought fearlessly, asking no quarter, regardless of the consequences.”

      “Ah, there you go,” said I. “There you go—Daniel puts it in a nutshell. Lacking his sure grasp of the essence of things, I was simply going to say: they were both Jewish, and a credit to their people.”

      Daniel had recovered from his first shock at seeing me. Now he found a smile and extended his hand. It was like taking hold of a bag of nuts. As with all old prize-fighters, every bone in those hands had been broken, at one time or another. For Daniel had been a pugilist, of course, after the two of us had left the Army. I had been a trainer of pugilists—and still was.

      “My old friend John Thomas Rennert,” said Daniel, almost as if he meant it. “After all these years. Welcome, brother—and doubly welcome if you’ve come to confess your Christian faith and join us in our work. No? Ah, well—for I can tell by your merry laugh that this is not the case. Or at least not yet, for who can say when the Lord may come to each of us, and rap upon our door, and call upon us to open? But welcome nonetheless. I’ll pour you a glass for old times’ sake, and we’ll sit and chat awhile in fellowship. After that you’ll be on your way, for I’m sure you’re a busy man as you always were. And these days I have myself so very much to be getting on with.”

      That voice again, after all these years. I’d half-forgotten what an instrument it was. Daniel could always talk. So could I, of course, as I’ve confessed already—but that was talking in a different way. I could talk the sparrows down from the trees. Daniel could halfways convince them they were eagles.

      He opened a cabinet and took out a bottle of the pale and a single mug. “For I no longer have truck nor trade with spirituous drink,” he said. “If you cast your mind back, perhaps you’ll recall the reason why.” A shadow crossed his face, and of course I remembered vividly. “Nine years sober,” he said, quietly. “Since that morning in Bristol—you were there, John Thomas—when God reached out and lifted me from the mire.”

      “Then I compliment you on your resolve. Your very good health,” I said, raising my brandy, and added with a wink: “Captain O’Thunder. For I understand it’s ‘Captain’ these days.”

      He gave me a look. “I am many things these days, John Thomas, and Captain is one of them. But I’m not at all the man you used to know.”

      He had taken me to a little sitting area off in a corner, with a bench and a rickety wooden chair. It happened to be out of the immediate earshot of the Miss Sherwoods, who had gone back to mending hand-me-down clothes, and also the Diggory party, who had returned to sit with the cashbox by the door. For no man is comfortable when his past comes strolling up the stairs to introduce itself to his new friends, especially a man with a past like Daniel’s.

      “I can see that you’ve changed indeed, old friend,” said I, privately doubting this very much. For none of us ever changes, not really. “And yet in one important particular, you’re exactly the same man as ever. You’re fit, as I said already, as a fiddle. You look as fit as the man who licked Long John Jurrock in fifty-two rounds—remember that? You look as if you could step into the ring this afternoon, against the Tipton Slasher himself.”

      Daniel laughed out loud. “The Tipton Slasher? My friends would carry me out in a horse blanket, John Thomas, half a minute after I stepped in. I haven’t fought in nearly a decade. I’m fat and thirty-three years old. I feel it, brother—and more than that, I look it. So why don’t you tell me what this is about, and what you’re angling towards, so I can shake your hand one last time and wish you well and be done with it?”

      A smile remained on his face. But there was a resoluteness too, that hadn’t been there in the old days. I wasn’t sure I liked that resoluteness.

      “What you’re saying is true enough, Daniel—or part of it, at any rate. You’re not as young as you were—who is?—and perhaps you wouldn’t stand for long against the Slasher. But the fact remains, you retired from the prize-ring too soon. You departed from the green faerie circle before you’d had a chance to reach your prime. I’ve mused upon this many times, these past nine years—I’ve thought upon it with a lingering sadness, Dan—I’ve wondered often and again, ‘What might Daniel O’Thunder have achieved, had he stayed with the game just a little while longer?’ And I wager you’ve done so too.”

      I leaned forward, for now I was in my stride, and closing in on the quarry. “You’re a fighter, Daniel—that’s what you are, and always will be. And I have a Proposition.”

      “You always did, John Thomas. The answer is no.”

      “Hear me out. It concerns a young man I’ve taken an interest in, called Spragg the Ruffian. You’ve heard of him? I see you have, for he’s been mentioned in the sporting papers. Well, we’ve fought him a few times up North, and he’s done well. A strong, strapping lad—not much in the way of technique just yet, but he’s learning, and he can deliver a blow. He bested the Croyden Drover— remember him?—and stretched out the Onion Boy, flat as a mackerel, after twenty-seven minutes. So now it’s time to bring him South, closer to London, for that’s where the potential for glory lies, and reputations are to be made.”

      “You mean, that’s where the money is.”

      “I don’t deny it. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’—except it don’t get given, does it, Daniel? It must be purchased, with coin of the realm. So. It’s time for the Ruffian to be introduced to the wider sporting public. More than that, it’s time to find out what he has for bottom, for he hasn’t been tested yet. I need a man who’ll test his chin. I also need a man who’ll draw the Fancy. And you still have a name—no, don’t be modest, you do. You had a certain little popularity in your day, and there are those who remember. Most of all, I need a story that I can tell. For that’s what it is—beyond the fine old English art of self-defence, and the hearts of oak, it’s the story that draws ’em in. I admit this freely, because we’re old friends, Daniel. It’s always been honest-as-the-livelong-day between us, and I intend to be honest now.”

      The shaggy head was cocked to one side, and there was a little smile on that great ugly mug. If fighters weren’t ugly when they started, they were ugly when they’d finished—or more to the point when the game had finished with them. The cauliflower ears, and the flattened nose, and the knots and lumps like boles on a tree trunk. But you could see a kind of nobility in a face like that, if you chose to. Give him credit, Daniel O’Thunder had a kind of nobility.

      And now it was time to bring this home.

      “Daniel, I’m afraid I must shock you. For whatever you’ve been told about the character of Spragg the Ruffian—whatever rumours you’ve heard about riotous living and addiction to all manner of vice and abandonment—it’s worse. I don’t say that his heart is bad, for few men’s hearts are truly so, not rotten clear through. But he’s fallen into a bad way of living, Daniel. He’s a braggart and a bully and a man of violent outbursts. When you tax him with his duty to his fellow man, he sneers. And when you speak of the Judgement that awaits us all, he laughs in your face—for Daniel, he don’t believe in God. And that,” said I, building towards the very nub of it, “that is the match I want to make, and the story I want to tell. Spragg the atheistic Ruffian, against O’Thunder the evangelist.”

      Daniel was silent for a moment, musing. “Preacher O’Thunder, God’s Warrior, that sort of thing?”

      “I was thinking,” said I, “of Battling O’Thunder, and his right hand the Hammer of Heaven.”

      He moved his jaw a bit, from side to side, as if trying out the feel of it in his mouth. “That’s good,” he admitted. “I have to say,