JIU-JITSU VS. MUSCLE.
All else forgotten now, Ned fought warily.
Time and again Kennell rushed at him, apparently trying to end the
battle in a hurry. But every time he rained his blows on thin air. Ned,
perceiving that his only chance lay in tiring the man out, had early
decided to adopt cautious tactics.
While avoiding the terrific rushes of his opponent, however, he still
managed once in a while to land an effective blow.
On Kennell's seasoned body, however, they seemed to have but little
effect.
The jackies groaned in sympathy for the lad as he put up his plucky and
skillful defense. It was clear that they believed that the battle would
be simply a question of a few minutes, unless it was cut short by the
arrival of an officer.
As the petty officers were at dinner, however, and the commissioned
dignitaries were enjoying a smoke aft, there seemed little likelihood
of any interference before the contest was ended. The men were
fighting in the shelter of the turret, so from the bridge nothing of
what was transpiring was visible to the navigating officers or the
quartermasters.
"You young hound, I'm going to kill you!" hissed Kennell, white with
rage, as, for the twentieth time one of his terrific swings met thin
air.
"Catch me first!" mocked Ned, skipping backward with agile footwork.
Kennell, who was breathing heavily, seemed fairly to spring at the lad
as he spoke, but Ned nimbly sidestepped, and Kennell went careening
ahead like a man shot out of a suddenly checked auto.
"Keep your wind to fight with!" advised Ned jeeringly. But, alas for
his confidence, as he spoke his foot caught on a deck ring he had not
observed, and he fell backward, sprawling.
He was up in a breath, but Kennell, with a roar of triumph, was on him
in a flash.
The bluejacket's great arms, hairy as a bear's, shot out and encircled
Ned in a grip that threatened to crush his ribs in.
It was a lock grip.
Ned, as the breath was slowly crushed out of his body, felt as if the
fight had ended.
He saw defeat, utter and absolute, staring before him.
Perhaps this thought gave him almost superhuman strength, for the next
minute, with an agile twist, he had writhed clear of the deathly grip
and had in his turn laid hold of the bully in a wrestling clutch.
It was the ancient "grapevine," and Kennell smiled a cold, deadly smile
as he felt and knew the old school-boy grip. Throwing it off as easily
as if it had been the clutch of an infant, he crouched, and, rushing
in, caught Ned craftily about the middle; but Ned, slipping aside,
gripped the sailor with a peculiar twist, and seemingly with no great
exertion, shot him over his head.
The tars set up a cautious shout.
It was an old trick of wrestling, in which Ned was perfectly at home;
but, to his amazement, the agile Kennell fell on his feet as lightly as
a cat, instead of crashing to the deck as Ned had expected.
The bluejacket, brute though he was, was just as evidently a master
wrestler and up to all the tricks of the game.
Indeed, as Ned watched his confident leer as he recovered from what the
boy had expected to be a crushing overthrow, there was an expression
on the fellow's crafty face that struck a chill that was almost one of
dread into Ned's heart.
As for the jackies, they watched in silent fascination.
Not a sound was to be heard but the quick "patter-patter" of the
wrestlers' feet on the decks as they "sparred" for a fresh opening.
Suddenly Kennell crouched low, and, before Ned could check him, was
once more upon the boy.
But now his tactics were wholly changed.
His method of wrestling was unlike any that Ned had ever seen or heard
of.
Yet how deadly it was the boy quickly began to experience.
Kennell's fingers, spread like the talons of a hawk, glided here and
there about the lad's body rapidly as the undulating movements of a
snake. Wherever they touched, the boy felt a sharp shock of intense
pain shoot through his frame.
Beads of cold perspiration jetted out on his forehead.
A numbing sickness seized hold of him.
And still Kennell's deadly fingers pressed here, there, and everywhere,
bringing the sickening agony that Ned had already tasted in their wake.
The very fact that he could not understand what was happening added to
the boy's alarm.
He had been in many wrestling matches. In fact, he was a better
performer on the mat than with the padded gloves, but in all his
experience he had never met an opponent like Kennell.
Clumsily built as the man was--he had not an iota of the agility
possessed by the lithe and supple Ned--yet he seemed to wind and twist
like a sapling under Ned's holds; recovering from each grip, he laid
his hands on the boy with the same deadly precision.
Ned began to feel that his nervous system was a pincushion for his
opponent to puncture at will.
The old hiplock, the Nelson, the half-Nelson, the grip at the back of
the neck--all these tricks of the wrestler's craft Ned tried in turn,
but none of them seemed to have any effect on Kennell.
And all the time the bluejacket kept up his deadly assaults on Ned's
nerve centers, pressing them deftly and producing excruciating pain.
Once Ned wrenched free, and glad he was of the brief spell in which he
could take stock of his remaining faculties.
It was not that he was winded, or that Kennell was too strong for him.
In fact, Ned felt that, well-muscled as the bluejacket was, he had his
own system in better fighting shape.
The strange methods of Kennell were what worried him. He could not seem
to escape the assaults of those hawklike hands.
Suddenly a partial explanation of the mystery came to him.
Old Tom stepped forward and whispered in his ear, during the brief
period in which the two sprang about, eying each other narrowly.
"He's jiu-jitsu! Look out!"
The full meaning of these words shot into Ned's brain.
He recollected now having heard some talk about Kennell's having served
in the Far East on his first enlistment.
Doubtless it was there that he had learned the subtle, deadly Japanese
tricks that he was now exercising on his inexperienced opponent.
Gladly would Ned have come to open boxing. In a ring, under proper
rules, he was well convinced he could whip the burly Kennell; but
under the conditions he now faced, he was by no means certain of his
ultimate chance of victory.
And now Kennell, with his snakelike glide, closed in again, and Ned
seized him without warning in a half-Nelson.
Back and back bent the bulky form of the bluejacket till it seemed that
his vertebra must crack under the cruel pressure.
But to Ned's sickened amazement, the other wriggled from the hold as if
he had been some reptile, and there was the work all to be done over
again.
One fact, however, Ned noticed with satisfaction.
If he was becoming exhausted, Kennell was also tiring. His breath was
coming sharply, with a hissing intake, like that of a laboring pump.
The strain was telling on him.
Ned felt, if he could only hold out a little longer, that he would lay
his opponent low.
But could he last?
The contest now was simply a matter of brute endurance plus skill,
and in the latter quality Ned felt that Kennell, in his Oriental way,
possessed the advantage.
Suddenly Ned found himself with a grip on both of Kennell's arms at
once.
A flood of joy rushed through his veins. He felt certain that few men
could resist the pressure he could now exert with his mighty forearms
and biceps.
"Now where are your jiu-jitsu tricks?" he hissed, as he drew the
struggling Kennell nearer and ever nearer with the same resistless
force as is exerted by the return plunge of a piston.
Kennell, his face white, with an ashy tinge about the corners of his
mouth, said nothing, but fought with every ounce of strength within him
against the steady pressure that was drawing him closer and closer into
Ned's crushing embrace.
As Ned had said, "Where were his jiu-jitsu tricks now?"
The breathing of the two men came in short, sharp barks that sounded
hoarsely as coughs as they stood straining there in a deathlike lock.
For a second or two all motion ceased, and they stood, except for the
working of their opposed muscles, like two stone figures.
The next instant, however, the slow, irresistible force of Ned's
compressing arms overcame Kennell's stubborn resistance, and the
bluejacket was dragged yet nearer into the toils he dreaded--dreaded
with white, frightened face and beaded brow.
But even as Ned prepared to throw him with a mighty crash to the deck,
a strange thing happened.
Kennell's body grew limp as a half-filled flour sack and slid like an
inert mass down Ned's body.
The next instant the boy felt his ankles gripped in a steel-like
hold, and, utterly unable to resist, he was toppled over to the
deck. As he fell, one of Kennell's big hands slid round to the back
of the Dreadnought Boy's neck, and Ned simultaneously experienced a
queer, fainting feeling, as if he were being borne far away from the
_Manhattan_ and his surroundings, up, far aloft, into the fleecy clouds.
Again the hand struck, so softly it seemed as if his neck had been
merely stroked, but the sense of illusion increased.
Ned's eyes closed.
Suddenly--just as it seemed to the boy that he was entering a
delightful land, where flowers bloomed luxuriantly and birds sang the
sweetest song--a sharp voice shattered his illusion like a soap bubble.
"Ned! Ned, old chap! Get him, for the love of Mike!"
It was the red-headed Herc released from his cell ahead of time by the
captain's commutation of sentence.
Like a steel spring suddenly released, Ned's body curved upward, and
the next instant the wily Kennell's body was in his close embrace.
This time Ned had caught him where all his Oriental tricks were of no
avail.
Back and back he bent Kennell till, with a great gasp, the bluejacket
crashed down to the deck, his head striking with a heavy thud.
"Downed him!" shouted old Tom, capering.
"The kid wins!" yelled the delighted jackies.
Kennell, dazed and astounded at his sudden loss of the match he had
made sure was his, got clumsily to his feet.
"Shake hands," said Ned simply, extending his palm. "I don't like you,
Kennell, but I think you are the cleverest wrestler I have ever met."
With a scowl of fury and a half-articulated cry of rage, Kennell dashed
the outstretched hand from him and hastened away from the jeering
cries of his shipmates, with whom, as has been said, he was by no means
popular.
"Well, if he doesn't care to be friends," remarked Ned, as the jackies,
led by Herc, crowded around him and shook his hand warmly, "he doesn't
have to. I suppose we shall have to take the consequences."
What those consequences were to be neither of the Dreadnought Boys
dreamed at that instant. Perhaps it was as well they did not.
While the congratulations were still going on, a boatswain's mate came
bustling up.
Perhaps he detected the symptoms of something unusual having occurred
in the excited faces of the jackies and in Ned's still heaving chest
and flushed face, but he was too wise a man to inquire into something
he had not witnessed with his own eyes. As it was, therefore, he simply
contented himself by inquiring for Kennell.
"With the gun crew," suggested one of the throng.
"He won't be long," replied the boatswain's mate shortly and with a
meaning look.
"Why not?" asked old Tom, the privileged character.
"Because, my boy, he has been relieved from duty in the forward turret
and the two recruits put there in his place."
"Phew!" whistled the jackies, as the boatswain's mate hurried forward
on his quest.
"Now look out for squalls!"