Page:Fighting Back (1924).pdf/354

 learned enough Frog to ask Yvonne this simple little question, to viz, 'Will you wed me, Kid?' Well bein' a smart girl, Yvonne immediately hung her comely head and murmured soft and low, '' ' Mais oui! ' ''—'at's Paris for 'Absolutely!' This gets me a bit delirious, but I says, 'Thanks very much!' and rushed her off to a minister before she knowed what it was all about. Yvonne's one of the main reasons I left the ring, because she didn't wish to be married to no prize fighter, which I'm glad to say I ain't any more!"

"When was you one?" I asks.

"C'mon, Yvonne, let's leave these roughnecks," says Ptomaine. "We've did enough slummin' for to-day!"

It took half the trainin' camp to hold me and the big stiff got away.

In due course of time, Jack Thomas, the Arabian Goliath, unboated himself at the United States and is met at the dock by an army of sport writers and photographers. From the reception this gil got he might of been one of them foreign lecturers which loathes our manners, but loves our dollars—the difference bein' that there was a chance that the Arab really had somethin' to deliver. The mammoth Thomas at least looked like a killer and for days afterwards the sport pages is full of his sensational history and the stark terror he'd created in the ring. Lady writers interviewed him from the female points of view, he was photographed almost hourly and generally gave the freedom of the city by New York, which is much freer with that than with anything else.

Well, Thomas at once goes into secret trainin' for