Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/187

 Anyways, I take up this business course and also enroll for the evening lectures at Columbia College, because I'm still incurably addicted to ambition—the thing which drove me from one meaningless job to another—a wild and undownable craving to be somebody, to get somewhere! I ain't got no blue blood in me; I know that on the account it always come out red when I got cuffed on the nose—a mere detail in my business. But I had too much fighting blood in me to be a John Smith in Life's phone book for long!

Judy went to this business school with me, and, of course, that didn't make it hard to take at all. She graduated from Drew City Prep a few weeks after my quarrel with Frankie Jackson, and as her mother has absolutely no connection with the Vanderbilt family or the equivalent, why, Judy got ready to bust into the business world herself so's twelve o'clock would mean lunch at the boarding house and not just noon.

Knockout Kelly, which by that time was keeping steady company with pretty Mary Ballinger, was always riding me for studying at nights instead of stepping out. Kayo claimed life's too short for that kind of business and that education is a great handicap to success. Be ignorant and be a winner, says Kayo.

"I don't know if algebra is pink or green," he tells me one day. "I can't spell necessity and words like that. For all I know, North Dakota is the capital of Wyoming. But—I'm clickin' off from three to five thousand smackers a fight, never more than forty