Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/116

 In them four battles I am trading wallops less than a half hour altogether—the first one only goes sixteen seconds—and my gross receipts is just $1,200. When Nate picks me from behind Ajariah Stubbs's soda fountain, I have to work twelve hours a day for two years to click off twelve hundred smackers! Honest, I felt like the laborer which win fifty dollars the first time he ever bet on a horse race in his life and says in astonishment: "How long has this been going on?"

One of the first things I done when the money begin to roll in like this was to get myself two swell suits of clothes, a complete and classy outfit of gents furnishings and a hundred-buck diamond ring. The rest opens a savings account and I put on no more dog from then until I had a real bankroll. But this first plunge I simply had to take and that's a fact. All my life I had wanted to have two suits of clothes—one for every day and one for when I'm stepping out. Then that diamond—it was a pip, too—well, that was simply another case of must have! It gives a fellow a air of—eh—but you get me, don't you?

On my nineteenth birthday Nate signs me up with a sapolio called Shifty McTague for my first start as a middleweight. Ten rounds at Irontown, Pa., for a guarantee of $600 if I stay the limit. If on the contrary, I get paid at the rate of $50 a round, and no tips. McTague, a big favorite in Irontown, is to get a thousand bucks flat even should I smack him for a mock turtle, which I don't mind telling you is what I intended to do, no matter what his own plans is for re-