Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/63

 sneers. He pulls a roll of bills from his pocket that no grayhound in the world could jump over, and he throws a few of 'em on the desk. "Shoot the piece, grandpa!" he says. "There's the twenty-five fish, and 'at's all you git if you cry your eyes out!" He turns to me: "You in a jam?" he asks quickly, paying no attention to the judge's red face.

In a low voice I told him, kind of hurriedly, what was what. Nate grunts and hands the raging Jeff Haines my fifty-dollar fine.

At's seventy-five bucks I'm in you," he says to me. "C'mon, git out of here before this old hick takes me for his winter expenses!"

Well, getting the air from Ajariah Stubbs, and Nate Shapiro coming to my rescue at the critical minute, just about decided me what to do. I walked back to the Commercial House with Nate, and before I left him I had signed a contract with him, fixed legal by Mr. Tompkins, the recorder of deeds and notary public. Nate agrees to room, board, and clothe me till the time I'm able to earn my first jack in the ring; after that I'm to give him fifty per cent of my wages. He promises he'll rush me along to the top, but he says I got to be satisfied with small purses at first. This kind of casts me down a bit. I ask him what he means by "small purses."

"Oh—a couple hundred bucks a fight," he says, carelessly.

Two hundred dollars a fight and Nate Shapiro calls that small! Why, I'd been working twelve hours a day for nearly four months for that much jack. And,