Page:Fighting Back (1924).pdf/18

 over in my mind a dozen schemes to help him out of his jam. The funny thing is that the stunt the Kid actually did, and the one you'd imagine I'd think of first, didn't even enter my head. Kid Roberts had never liked fightin'—hated the game, in fact—and only laced on the gloves in the first place to put his old man on his feet, like I told you. When he lost his title to Knockout Pierce and married Dolores Brewster, he publicly announced that he was through with boxin' for all time, and I guess he meant it, but circumstances alter cases, as the Hindus says.

Anyways, this day the Kid took me into his beautiful library and we pulled up easy-chairs near the big French window overlookin' the lawn. I didn't start to tell him how sorry I was about his father which he had just buried. I just gripped his hand and held it—that told him all of it.

"Well, Joe," he says after a bit, with a kind of nervous grin, "I—I'm broke again!"

"That's where you're wrong," I remark pleasantly. "You got twenty-five grand!"

I had come prepared, and I flung a certified check on the table.

"Half my roll, Kid," I says. "I got fifty-odd grand; there'll be more when you need it!"

Kid Roberts sits forward in his chair and looks at me for a minute with a extremely odd expression on his face. Then he picks up my check and gazes at it kind of wonderin'ly, gulpin' a couple of times and fin'ly blowin' his nose with much violence. I busied myself watchin' the autos shootin' past the house on the