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“I want to tell you in clear and understandable English that you are a damned liar and a puppy,” replied Augustine in a loud booming voice that all could hear.

“You are a God-damned liar,” Pulitzer snapped back.

Words ceased. Augustine moved toward Pulitzer. Bulky and strong, with fists twice the size of an ordinary man’s, Augustine had the edge in combat with his beanpole, bespectacled opponent. Pulitzer retreated. “Everyone who knows Augustine knows that one would be hard-pressed to find one man in 100,000 who is built like him,” Pulitzer said. “As far as his physical strength is considered, he was ten times my better.”

When Pulitzer had completed about ten to twelve paces of his retreat, Augustine raised his fist. In his assailant’s hands, Pulitzer thought he saw “a heavy, gleaming yellow instrument,” that he presumed to be brass knuckles. Pulitzer withdrew his pistol and fired. Incredibly, the veteran cavalryman missed his massive target. As they struggled across the parlor, Pulitzer pulled the trigger again, but the barrel of the gun was deflected downward and the bullet only grazed Augustine in the right calf.

Nevertheless, the wound in his leg enraged Augustine, who, like a speared bull, charged and pinned Pulitzer in the corner of the room. There he flung Pulitzer down. “I mashed his head against the case-board of the room, and tried to get the pistol out of his hand,” Augustine said. Two men rushed over to separate them. When one tried to take the pistol away from Pulitzer, he would not loosen his grip. But when the other friend asked, Pulitzer surrendered the weapon.

Having retrieved his coat from the bowling alley, Ittner was strolling slowly back to his room when he heard a small boy running and yelling that a man had shot another at the hotel. “The thought instantly struck me that this was the result of Pulitzer’s controversy with Edward Augustine and that it was a pistol he had taken from his valise on entering our room so abruptly a short while ago,” Ittner said. He rushed to the hotel, where he found his roommate surrounded by a crowd, nursing his head wound.

As he drew near, Pulitzer looked up at him with a broad grin on his face and said, “Hello, Tony.”

“You’ve been playing the ‘Devil,’ Joe, haven’t you?” Ittner asked.

Ittner, who was also a friend of Augustine’s, left Pulitzer’s side and went to see the wounded man in his room upstairs. Augustine was surrounded by many friends and was being tended by a doctor, who was also a fellow legislator. “I found him sitting on the edge of his bed with his wounded leg resting on same, complacently smoking a cigar; the wound being in the calf of leg and not at all dangerous,” Ittner said. The crowd in the hotel room was agitated. One legislator “went so far as to suggest taking the law in their own hands,” he said, “as it seems that the officers of the law in this town are not disposed to protect citizens of the State from deadly assault with intent to kill.”

By the time Ittner returned to the parlor, Pulitzer had left and gone back to the boardinghouse. Ittner rushed to their room. When he arrived, a police officer was knocking on the door. The man asked Pulitzer to accompany him to the station. Ittner followed and posted a bail bond for his roommate. In the morning, Pulitzer appeared in city court, where he acted as his own attorney. He was fined for “breach of peace,” a violation of the city’s ordinances. Though Pulitzer was only a student of law, he knew he could later face more serious criminal charges, not to mention political consequences.

When the House convened, an angry representative from St. Louis waited impatiently for the conclusion of the chaplain’s prayer before rising and asking the Speaker to be recognized. “The disgraceful scenes which transpired at one of the principal hotels of this city last night,” he said, “demand an impartial investigation into the causes and circumstances attending that lamentable occurrence.” To accomplish this, he offered a resolution to create