Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/384

 to begin then. Besides that's a Hades of a way for a champion to lose, now ain't it? I have slapped many a boy stiff myself and if it was my turn now, why, I was in there to take it.

A punch by punch description of that battle would be monotonous and there was no pleasant memories connected with it for me. In the twelfth and thirteenth Long battered me from pillar to post, putting more stuff on his swings, now that I was a set-up. Some of the customers even begin to walk out on us because the result looked like a foregone conclusion. I remember dully wondering how it would feel to get knocked stiff, a thing that never had happened to me before. Then I'd get desperate and lash out with both hands, once landing a wicked right on Long's face that sent my friends howling and jumping on the chairs. But they was just flurries and Long soon learned to figure just when I was going to start 'em and he'd cover up and weather the storm. I guess I took almost as much punishment in my last battle as I did in my entire career up to then. I was down for short counts twice in the fourth, twice in the fifth, once in the seventh, three times in the eleventh, once again in the thirteenth—a total of nine times in a fifteen-round scuffle. Plenty!

In the fourteenth round, Long, driven wild by his inability to stop me, opened up and began swinging 'em from the next block. This was my only chance and I went at it like a collie after a bone. The instant I felt him tiring from his own efforts I gathered the last remaining strength I had left and tied in to make