Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/172

 I was saving for my clash with the middleweight champ the next night, I ask Judy will she take a walk to the lake with me, as it's still fairly early. Judy waits so long to answer that I'm just on the brinks of begging her pardon for asking, when she suddenly says "Yes!" and then I'm almost afraid to breathe for fear I'll bust my luck. She stops me from getting too sentimental when I commence thanking her for leaving the party with me. She says she could hardly do anything else when her escort was asked to leave. We are sitting on the bank of the lake, hid from everything but each other.

"Then you didn't do it for me, Judy?" I says, terrible disappointed. "You mean you would of left with anyone under the same conditions?"

Judy commences plucking at the grass and keeps looking away from me.

"I wouldn't have been there with anyone, Gale," she says slowly, "or—here!"

Well, I ain't exactly stupid, and the rest of the conservation is nobody's business, now, is it?

We got home about eleven, and Nate's sitting on the front porch waiting for me with a four-alarm fire in each eye. He says nothing at all till Judy goes upstairs, and then he gives me a terrible tongue lashing for staying up late the night before the biggest fight of my life. When he gets all through I says I agree with every word he's said, and was he ever in love? With a wild yell Nate throws up his hands and, grabbing a pillow from the porch hammock, he chases me upstairs to bed.