Ashley bowed his respect before the match, but the monkey boxer, apparently angered by Winch's derision, stood rocklike, unmoving, ungiving of respect. A low murmur went through the crowd around the ring. This was not to be done. This was twice that tradition had been broken. First with the open insult from Winch, and then with the monkey boxer's failure to honor his opponent.

It was then that Ashley, looking at his opponent's face, knew the man meant to kill him. It was a smell as much as anything, his own body emitting something that told him he held his own life in his hands and he did not want it there.

Ashley desperately wanted to assume some known form of defensive position he had learned, but a greater force took over. His mind. He knew he should not be on the mat with this expert in the first place. Nothing he had ever learned would be good enough to compete with this man staring hate from his brown slanted eyes, the face twisted, the teeth bared, the body rising on the tips of the toes, and then one foot leaving for the spring. Only something Ashley had never tried before might work. He was committed to what Winch had told him.

The lights were hot overhead and the crowd seemed to disappear as he forced his unwilling body to approach the master, as he forced his feet wide for a solid stance—and then, as he saw the flash of the monkey boxer striking at his eyes, he also saw the tiny lines of ridge on the man's teeth, and Bill Ashley pushed forward, his hand coming to the boxer's chest.

Later he would tell people he did not know what happened. But there, in the heat of the center of the mat, he felt his hand go into the hard chest of the monkey boxer, and the boxer's blow forced his own body around Ashley's hand like the spoke of a wheel moving around the hub, and the monkey boxer hit the mat with a thwack. Ashley's hand was still out there in front of him. The boxer twitched and a drop of blood reddened the white mat under the dark black oriental hair.