Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/145

 as a "draw" in boxing, no matter what amybody says. "One guy always has a shade on the other. I didn't want no draws. I wanted to either knock 'em dead or get knocked and be done with it!

Knockout Kelly butts in and tells Nate I'm right and to leave me win my fight. He points to a scar under his own eye and says that once when his eye was closed in a battle Nate made a little cut under it which let out the clogged blood, and he was able to force the lid open with his glove and keep stepping. I turn around to Nate.

"Get out your penknife, Nate, and let's go!" I says.

I hear wild cheers right under my stool. It's the dress-suited guys in the ringside boxes which has been taking all this in. Nate moans, but he opens his penknife and makes a slit under my right eye where it's swollen. Then him and Kayo squeezes it. It don't hurt—much. The referee waves Lee's seconds out of the ring and the bell clangs. I got up slowly, holding my right eye open with my gloves till I get a fair view of Lee. I'm still humming: "A left to the body and a right to the chin!" Lee's handlers yells for him to go after my burn eye, and he lets a panic-stricken left go which bounces off my hunched shoulder. Then I set myself and drove my left into his ribs. Down comes Lee's guard and sock goes my right on that mole, just about the point of his chin. His knees buckle under him and the great big stiff slides under the lower rope to the floor, as cold as a shark's eye!

My friends in the boxes acts like raving maniacs, and silk hats and canes gets hurled in the air. But my