Page:Fighting Back (1924).pdf/70

 first, a habit of mine. Aha, I think to myself, just what the Kid needs—the word from his wife that she's rootin' for him to go in and win! Like a book, what I mean, hey? I hold the message in front of the fast-recoverin' Kid's eyes. He shakes his head a couple of times to clear it, looks at me with a puzzled frown and then reads the cable. Slowly his teeth comes together with a click and his jaw sets hard. He scowls across the ring at Jim Oliver, and, suddenly pushin' me away, he jumps off the stool, though there's eight seconds before the bell, and stands there waitin' for it with the impatience of a prancin' two-year-old at the barrier. This eagerness to get at it from a guy which flopped on his stool apparently all but out at the end of the last round puts the crowd in a fresh frenzy and nobody heard the gong for the third frame but the fighters themselves!

This is the cheering cable which Dolores sent her hard-pressed hubby to show she was standin' by him and to hop him up to win:

Hot scrapple! Should I only of read that thing first, Kid Roberts would never of cast a eye over it. Imagine sendin' that kind of a pannin' to a guy losin'