Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/103

 judge likes Lem for what he done in the war. He's one of the few which ain't forgot. So Judge Tuckerman bangs on his desk with his gavel for silence. After he gets it he asks Lem how he's feeling and did them new goloshes come in from the wholesale house yet, and then he tells him to present my case. When Lem gets through, the judge discharges me, glares at the trembling Rags, and soaks him the costs of my arrest.

"I ought to commit ye to the State insane asylum!" says the judge to Rags while Rags is frisking himself for the fine. "For anybody which calls a prize fighter a crook and a liar to his face is either crazy or has a suicidal mania!"

So that was all settled.

Well, Spence Brock heard I was pinched and he came rushing down to see what he could do for me. Lem Garfield tells him what made me sock Rags and Spence tells Judy in school the next day. All about who sent her mother that life-saving hundred bucks and everything. When I come in from the training camp for supper that night Judy done everything but kiss me and Mrs. Willcox even done that! Rags comes around about eight o'clock to "explain" matters to Judy and she won't even see him, but she sits out in the swing on the back porch with me and we talk over—tots of things. She wanted me to take the sixty-four bucks her mother had already saved up toward the hundred I loaned her, but I says to keep it, and if she will help me with my education this summer in exchange, I'll feel I'm getting the best of it. So that's what she done.