Ethel Watts Mumford

“ These jealous bugs is somethin' fierce! And if ever you strike one of 'em who wants to have sentimental sentiments marked on you for life, beat it, kid, to the tall timber. They're the worst of the whole lot! ”

“ And," she turned like a whirlwind on Breese, "let me tell you, that a feller who opens his wife's letters and fires her vanity box out of the window will never do for me. And the feller who's writin' his wife-once-removed to come back to him, while he's askin' another girl to sign up, is no man for me, either. Lady-from-Reno—Mrs. Kid Breese, that was—I'll take your advice, and cut it out!" She was at the door by then, and she turned for one last shot. "Thank you, Mr. Guff," she says in a mincin' voice, "but I won't have to trouble you for a couple of red hearts and a blue lover's knot. ”

“ I don't say he wasn't handsome, and I don't say he wasn't a perfect gentleman in lots of ways—but, take it from me. they don't know how to treat a lady. Why, he'd get so jealous of me, for nothin', that I couldn't live at all. ”

“ I wanted to treat some woman better than I'd treated you. I wanted to make it up to some woman just because you were a woman"—he got sort of tangled in his own words, but he went on doggedly, just the way he fights an up-hill fight in the prize ring. ”

“ But I got to talkin' with him, and forgot all about Kid Breese and the Big Fight, until in he walks with Bessie, just as McGirk left. She was all dolled up; as many plumes on her hat as a Spanish hearse, and her hair marcelled till it looked like a storm in the Yellow Sea. Kid was swellin' around a-spreadin' hisself.
"Here she is!" says he, "and tickled to death with your weddin' present, Guff. Take off your jacket, Bessie, and show the artist your lily arm." ”

“ Why, man alive, where's your trainer, to let you do such a fool thing? And Bessie Lewis! Aw, quit your kiddin'!" But Breese slipped his arm through mine and turned downtown toward my dump.
"No," says he, "I'm all signed up, and you know how much I like your work, Guff."
{ [dhr] } I NODDED. That boy is plumb crazy about tattoo. He was always hangin' around when I was on a nice complicated job, fairly itchin' to have it on hisself. ”

“ Take me back, instead. They say a prize fighter can't 'come back'—show 'em they lie, Mamie. Let me do it. And, girlie, I'm signed up to fight Knockout Burns. I can't do it with no heart in me. Mamie, for the sake of the game, give me another chance, and I promise you now, there'll be no side steppin', and you can land me the solar plexus for keeps if ever I go over the ropes. Mamie, old girl, will you?"
Then they clinched. After a while I got tired.
"Time!" I calls, suddenlike. Golly! you should have seen 'em break away. I liked to bust from laughin'. The Kid looked at me sort of dazedlike. ”

“ Two Hearts and a Lover's Knot
By Ethel Watts Mumford
THE tattoo man tells a tale of a Reno lady, a middleweight "pug," and the fighting man's betrothed; and, speaking after the manner of the tattoo man, "there is plenty doing," and you find in the bunch plenty of that nature whose one touch makes all bunches kin.
"WELL, Guff," said Kid Breese to me as I met him comin' out of Jim Brady's Athletic Club, "did you hear I'd signed on for the Big Fight?" ”

“ Mister, there's a brace of hearts comin' off my arm, and a good job, too!"
BY THE time the dame had got that far, it wasn't hypnotized I was, it was paralyzed clean through. I've seen a whole lot of rough work in my life, but the stuff the little ladies will pull is somethin' you can't never count on. Bessie Lewis had fetched me one look that said: "Shut up, you!" ”