Larry Evans

“ That the latter had fawned and flattered should have warned him what to expect, later on, but it did not. The greater wonder is that it did not go to his head a little. It seemed it couldn't help but do that.
It had been so sudden. Mediocrity one day, and obscurity. Mediocrity—and then world's champion, and the fierce white light which beats upon a throne! Of course there had been some to sneer. ”

“ The clique which had rated his reticence stingy was eager to believe. They needed no persuading. So no throngs gathered round him any more. Those who had fawned passed by on the far side of the street, lest crudely he recall past accommodations. And, passing, they smiled. And the public, that public to which a world's champion was something picturesque at which to crane the neck, if they recognized him at all now, had to concentrate to remember what it was that they had read lately about him. ”

“ Holliday had tested his strength and was contemptuous of it. Holliday was boring in and in with crushing blows that tore past glove and guard.
The house was now a screaming, tossing bedlam, the ring a welter. He heard English barking at him. Cover up! He was covered up. Blam! He dropped and rolled away and came again erect. And blam! He was covered up, as much as any man could cover. And then a glove sank into the pit of his stomach and doubled him over, sickened him, racked him with white-hot pain.
He got away again. Fight? They were shouting at him to fight. ”

“ For some time Perry Blair had been finding this hard to understand. The adulation had been so overwhelming at first, so whole-hearted and seeming sincere one brief year before. Why, even six months back he could not have stood there thus, a tenth as long, before the copper name-shield of the Claridge, without collecting about him a fawning, favor-hunting throng so dense, so tenacious, and troublesome to traffic that it would have brought the officer from his place beside the surface-car tracks, caustic-tongued, to investigate and disperse it. ”

“ The huge man had his first fair view of the other's fine hard youth; and while he observed the self-possessed eyes and long nose, acquisitive and courageous, Blue Jeans devoted the interval to a counter-scrutiny. He scanned the newcomer from head to foot, silk hose and hair-line suit and expensive panama. The rings upon those pudgy fingers held longest his wandering eye, the blue-white fortune in the burnt-orange cravat. But all this seemed to kindle no approval.
"Prosperous!" he muttered bitterly. "Prosperous! And yet I don't hate you like I did that superintendent. ”

“ Felicity isn't a figment of fancy. Felicity's from the life.
Cecille sat quiet after Felicity had gone, until darkness crept into the room. She rose then, mechanically, and prepared and ate some supper. Later Perry Blair came and she found that pressing as her own problem seemed she could still think first of him. She would not tell him now of Felicity's dereliction. He needed a single mind to face his coming struggle. ”

“ Just a home—just a man—a real man—content!"
"Would you be?" Cecille asked the question unaware of the other's irony.
"Say, who do you think I am," she asked, "to try to dictate terms like that to life? What do you think I am? A champion? Because that's what you're talking now. The whole purse—or nothing! I know my limits. I'm going to be glad to get a fair percentage split for my share. A home! A man! Content! I get you at last, Cecille. It's you who'd better come to. ”

“ And the fall hurt Perry a little, even accustomed as he was to the taking of blows yieldingly. He was slow to rise. The girl was quickly up.
"Last down!" she gasped, but her exclamation was somewhat pallid like her wit. "Hold 'em, Yale!"
Then, while she still faltered, uncertain, shaken, the occupant of the lemon-tinted limousine came swiftly to her. He was a great hulk of a man, yet light on his feet with that nimbleness which seems often astonishing in huge people.
"Let me put you in my car, Miss Brown," he begged, "and set you safely across. Not badly bruised, I trust?" ”

“ It must have been a shock to them to find in Perry Blair a sportsman, when they had expected a dead game sport. They had been waiting to lay at his feet (at a price) the spoils due a conqueror, spoils neither savory nor shining, but those which other champions had demanded and relished, until they waked to find themselves champion no more. ”

“ Then the toad-person had laid unclean eyes upon her in the dining-room of the Cactus House, and contrived meetings where their bodies must brush close in passing. And followed her to the station. And she was biting her lip now to keep from being silly and screaming; trying to plan in panic the scathing things which she must say.
It was dark there. The toad could not see her face and thus learn that her eyes were dilated. The East-bound roared in as he came up. She tried to run—it was her train—and couldn't. The toad put a hand upon her. ”

“ And each time Felicity's answer was unbelievably unconcerned and laconic.
"Nothing doing," she'd say. "He's hard boiled."
Familiarity breeds complacency oftener than contempt. But it was neither the one nor the other which forced Cecille to ask, over and over again. Once Felicity surprised in her eyes the light that invariably accompanied the question.
"You're a queer kid," she added that time, after the usual answer. "I sure don't get you." ”

“ One cannot of oneself acquire breeding, but it is possible to study technique. And I think Cecille's reason for sticking to Felicity to the very end is clear too. Once, before things happened, she was one of those people who believed in the inevitable dark river, or swift oblivion, or an agony of remorse. Believed pathetically.
I think Felicity Brown served her as a fearsome revelation of life stripped to its rawest essentials,—a demonstration of shattering truths which she would never have believed had she not stood by, looking on. ”

“ I have seen weddings that were ribald and not sacred, and I wanted ours to be none of that. Just you and I and the minister, with Hamilton and English standing by; and then just you and I going away together, leaving no wise winking, no meaning whispers behind. And that was right,—but only half right; I have been selfish with you. It is a sober step for a girl like you; she wants her folks at such a time. We will wait now for your people."
She had paused to wait for his answer—his anger—with one foot upon the running board, one foot on the curb. ”

“ Fanchette as a subject for copy had long been profitless as a sucked orange. Here again was the novelty of newness and a personality of exceeding richness and color. Or at least so ran report. No crack men had been sent out to cover the affair. That such an astounding thing as the rise of a new champion threatened had been foreseen by few. In the East Perry Blair had been little known and reckoned a third-rater. But those who had been West to see the bout which ended so suddenly brought back fragments which put a nice edge upon the imaginations of the sporting editors. ”

“ An unobserving person, still seeking the key to their intimacy, could easily blunder upon the old bromide and repeat that a pretty woman invariably prefers a plain one for a foil. But he would have to be a very blind fool indeed. For Felicity Brown's beauty, perfect enough under the spot of the Midnight Club's miniature stage, became a less flawless thing in contrast with Cecille. ”

“ Here and there one had arisen to point out that Fanchette, the man whom he had whipped in one round, had been but a shell of a man, champion in name only, for a long, long time. They said the victory proved nothing. They said that Perry Blair had just been lucky, that was all; lucky in being selected as the one least calculated to damage Fanchette after a whole year in which the latter had steadfastly refused to fight. Lucky in having that fox, Devereau, for a manager, cunning enough to decoy Fanchette into the ring. ”

“ Strength like that, which tossed him like a chip in the clinches, was no new thing to him. He'd often been handled that way, with the same ease, by men heavier than himself,—by Jack English, for example. And Holliday was heavier; he knew that he had given away pounds in the weighing in; that there had been crookedness at the scales, but he hadn't tried to prove it. Yet Holliday was stronger even than Jack English, unbelievably stronger. And Perry knew now that he was about to test that strength to the uttermost. Holliday had romped with the roughness of a great puppy ”

“ The porter was fussing with her bag, and her fervor overwhelmed him. But her next words were a shock.
"I—I want to get off," she blurted.
The porter shook his head; he had expected better from her, but all women were riddles.
"We's rolling now, ma'am," he answered. "No stop for two hundred miles."
That night Cecille Manners—Tweed-Suit will no longer serve—lay in her berth and watched the stars reel by. She had misjudged the west and come away too soon; she knew that now. She put her hand upon her arm. No, that wasn't the way it had felt; it had been strong, infallible. ”

“ If learning things out of a book would do it; if studying how to shoot the right language in the right spot and how to live sweet and pretty, inside and out, was going to get me what I wanted, well and good. ”

“ In a short interview, not as unsatisfactory as Devereau's, Pig-iron Dunham broke a rule and talked for publication.
"It is the sort of thing which has given a bad name to a clean and manly sport in this state," he said. "I sincerely trust, however, that all true lovers of the squared circle will put the blame where it belongs."
And in the meantime his paid mouthpieces parroted everywhere the words in which they had been drilled. He has no punch at all, they said; he can't hit. He has no science, they said; he is slow as a freight. He has not the fighter's heart. ”

“ Champion:—One who by beating all rivals has obtained an acknowledged supremacy. Then Devereau and Dunham were right. According to that he wasn't a champion. Nobody acknowledged him. But he'd teach 'em a better definition. A champion was someone who could go right on fighting when everybody was cheering for the other guy. A champion was somebody who could fool 'em that easy!—that complete! You bet! Who could fight and think at the same time, that clearly!—that logically!—like he was doing. ”

“ For nowhere in all this world could one hope to come upon a crowd better schooled in the rules of hero-worship, American-style, than this eleventh-hour mob which was pouring like tide-rips from side-street theaters into the city's main thoroughfare. ”

“ A pagan Perry, and one more beautiful than she otherwise could ever have dreamed. And yet, after the first startled glance, while she still dropped her head and put palms to her cheeks to hide a furious color, his lack of self-consciousness dismayed her, until it occurred to her that these were his working clothes—casual, ordinary. And with that a queer thought, seemingly unrelated, flashed through her head. She remembered that women almost never went to prize-fights—it was a man's sport—and she was jealously glad over that. ”

“ It is strange how silence will fool a man like Devereau. He made one last try for peace.
"And if you behave; if you're a good boy maybe we're going to forget we had this little misunderstanding. There's others besides Hughie just as soft. But if you're dead set on finding out who is boss; if you want to know whether you're Dunham's man or not, why just cross them orders. Pig-iron's got ten thousand on that fight—ten thousand that you don't win by a knock-out, if you win at all. ”

“ Larrabie wired. "What shall I do with him?"
And an answer had come back:
"Keep him under cover. Work him a little. Will send Devereau when the time is right."
So Blue Jeans had suddenly found his Dream in the process of coming true. For he had done, not happy at heart, just what the huge man had said he would do; he had decided to accumulate other and just as easy two hundreds.
"I'll herd by myself," was the way he argued himself to this decision. "I'm no lily, but I'll not soil myself worse with this bunch." ”

“ They'd think he was letting Holliday knock him out. He'd better get it over with; he was consumed with eagerness, anyhow, to tell Hamilton and English the joke about the roof, the joke which was on himself.
So he swayed with the next blow and rocked lightly back. He'd sit down no more. He swayed with the next one, but this time he snapped forward, glove and arm and shoulder. This time, on the rebound, he put all he had into it; and that after all was what a champion really was: A guy who had something always left to call on, a guy who could shoot it all, when the crisis came. ”