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By Root 758 0

the cockfighting fraternity are from all walks of life. There are men like myself, from good southern families, sharecroppers, businessmen, loafers on the county relief rolls, Jews, and Holy Rollers. If there is one single thing in the world, more than all the others, preserving the tradition of the sport of cocking for thousands of years, it's the spirit of democracy. In a letter to General Lafayette, George Washington wrote, “It will be worth coming back to the United States, if only to be present at an election and a cocking main at which is displayed a spirit of anarchy and confusion, which no countryman of yours can understand.” I carried a clipping of this letter, which had been reprinted in a game fowl magazine, in my wallet. I had told Mary Elizabeth once that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton had both been cockfighters during the colonial period, but she had been unimpressed. Nonetheless, cockfighters are still the most democratic group of men in the United States.

But the Milledgeville Tourney was unlike other U.S. meets. Senator Foxhall had his own rules, and he made his own decisions about whom to invite. I had earned my right to fight there, and I suppose the old man knew that I would be there if it was physically possible for me to be there. Maybe he didn't think Omar was ready yet. I didn't know. Surely Omar's fifty-fifty showing didn't put him into the top cocker's class. He still had a lot to learn about game fowl if he wanted to be a consistent winner.

I looked at Omar and smiled. There wasn't any use to write a note for him telling him what I thought was the reason for his turndown. His feelings would be hurt more than they were already. By writing to the senator, he had made a grave error, a social error. It was like calling a host of a party you were not invited to and asking point blank for an invitation!

I had finished my coffee, and I had work to do. I got up from the table and clapped Omar on the shoulder. Before leaving the shack, I took a can of lighter fluid off the dresser and slipped it into my hip pocket. Omar sighed audibly and decided to follow me out.

When we got to the cockhouse, I removed the Mellhorn Blacks one at a time from their separate coops, showing off the good and bad points to Omar as well as I could before putting them back. For a shipment of a dozen, they were a beautiful lot. As Jake had promised in his letter, six were full brothers, a few months past staghood, and the other six were Aces, two to three years old, with one or more winning fights behind them. Each cock was identifiable by its web-marking, and the cardboard record sheet of each bird had been enclosed in its shipping crate when Jake had expressed them down from North Carolina. Before putting them away the night before, I had purged them with a mild plain-phosphate mixture, and they were feeling fine as a consequence.

As a conditioning bench, I used a foam-rubber double mattress stretched flat on a wooden, waist-high platform Buford and I had knocked together out of scrap lumber when I had first leased the farm. I had one of the older Mellhorn cocks on the bench showing it to Omar. The cock was a one-time winner, but he must have won by an accident. His conformation was fair, but the bird was high-stationed, with his spurs jutting out just below the knee joint. He would miss as often as he hit. A low-stationed cock would have greater leverage and fight best in long heels, but a high-stationed cock like this one would never make a first-class fighter. Jake Mellhorn hadn't gypped me on the sale. He was truly bred, and in small-time competition against strainers, the cock could often win. It had weight in its favor and was close to the shake class, but the chicken couldn't really compete in S.C. competition unless it got lucky. Luck is not for the birds. The element of chance must- be reduced to the minimum if a cocker wants to win the prize money. In a six-entry derby, for instance, when the man winning the most fights takes home the purse put up by all the entries, the odd fight often provides the verdict.