Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/253

 fore the main bout. The holder of the lucky ticket will be gave one thousand bucks cash! There's a nifty which will only cost us another grand and which I figure will win us twenty times that much in extra tickets sold. Just think, for a five-buck bleacher seat, or a twenty-five-buck ringside seat, you got a chance to see the fight and go home a thousand fish to the good! The kid's clever, hey?

We got plenty publicity on this, and don't think we didn't. The results is that tickets begin to sell like rain would sell in Hades, and a couple of weeks before the meelee we are all sold out!

Nate and Judy is in New York one day checking up with the ticket stands and I am sitting in our office alone going over my figures, when a delegation calls on me headed by the last guy I ever expected to see again anywheres—Rags Dempster. Trying to get rid of this bird is like trying to get rid of measles! Besides Rags, they's three other guys—pale, hard-faced, and cold-eyed. I can't help thinking how perfect they'd all look wearing green eyeshades and with a deck of cards in their hands—or, maybe, automatics!

Rags looks around the office, evidently for Judy, and that heats me up to begin with. He greets me with a kind of sickly grin. Then he wants to know did Nate give me the ten thousand. I nod my head, watching the other guys carefully, and wondering what's what.

"Well, we're all squared up, then," says Rags. "Would you mind giving me a receipt—eh—say: 'Received of Maurice Dempster ten thousand dollars.' Sort of make it—eh—regular?"