Page:Fighting Back (1924).pdf/65

 what it's all about, the 15,000 humorists in the crowd of 15,000 trains their heavy artillery on him. Between the sarcastical wise cracks of the customers, the blindin', unfamiliar lights over the ring, the referee's gruff instructions, and this and that, poor Joseph was just a bundle of drawn nerves. He was rarin' to go and couldn't go for rarin'! One-Jab McGoldberg, no dwarf himself, looked a bit pale when he gazed on the human mountain he was asked to knock off and he talked to his troubled handlers very seriously. Just before the gong Ptomaine Joe's nerves got the best of him.

"Hold everything!" he suddenly howls to the crowd in a high-pitched voice; "I'm gonna lay this tomato like a rug!"

The mob is still graspin' its sides when the bell rings and Ptomaine Joe bounds out of his corner like a piece of india-rubber. His eyes is shut tight and his long arms is swingin' like windmills. The panic-stricken referee takes one wild look and then starts to flee for his life, but he was a bit too slow. The first punch Josephus landed caught the referee under the ear and knocked him out of the ring into the press seats! The crowd goes crazy, and One-Jab McGoldberg, the only guy in the joint not hysterical, creeps up behind Ptomaine Joe, measures the back of his head, hauls off and knocks him as stiff as a waiter's collar. The dazed and enraged referee sticks his head under the bottom rope and counts Joey out from there. Then he picks up a chair and was goin' to brain the prostrate chef, but cooler heads prevail.