- — Plutor
Hiram Oppie
From The Great Outdoor Fight
Having lost his left eye in the fight of 1888, Oppie prepared for the fight of '89 with a debt to be paid. In the year since his accident, he had exercised his good eye daily to increase its strength, and by the time of the fight was able to outline the alphabet using his virile right extraoculars. He had also engaged the services of the premiere optomotrist at the time, to create a superstrength gallery-style monocle, which enabled Oppie to have impeccable vision on the right.
As he paid much more attention to his monocle than anything else, on the day of the 1889 fight Oppie neglected to wind his pocketwatch and, therefore, became late and hurried. On his arrival to the fight, he promptly tripped over what he identified as the runner of a kudzu plant (although it would have been the first of its kind documented in California at the time) and stumbled. He fell to the ground and his monocle was dislodged from his face. Because of his severe refractive index in combination with the strength of the bright overhead sun, the dry foliage beneath the fallen monocle immediately caught fire and developed into a massive blaze. Nearby fighters saw Oppie arise from the blaze emptyhanded and assumed he had begun the blaze using special powers. The immediately forfeited the fight to Oppie out of fear he would use his special powers to harm them.
