Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/84

 picture, too. After reading the letter about a dozen times and looking at her picture for a half hour even, I felt like rushing right back to her and Drew City and leaving prize fighting flat on its back! But common sense and Nate Shapiro prevented me. On Judy's picture she wrote: "To Gale Galen, from Judy Willcox, his friend and well wisher." So I had my picture took by a swell Third Avenue photographer, in my ring togs, and I wrote on it: "To Judy Willcox, from Six-Second Smith, her friend and well wisher and admirer and promising contender for the world's welterweight championship."

After that, letters between us flew back and forth like seagulls. But while all Judy's notes is full of best wishes and hopes that I'll be a great man some day and remember Lincoln started life as a lowly rail-splitter and wound up as President and the etc why they is very little mention of "My Darling Gale" or "Your Loving Sweetheart, Judy" in any of 'em. In fact, they is no mention of that at all. If I had a boy friend named Judy, why the letters could of been from him as far as hugs and kisses is concerned. Once she sent me a list of books to get so's to "stimulate my imagination." I got 'em all and read most of 'em, with the kind assistance of my dictionary. I even give one of 'em, Huckleberry Finn, to Knockout Kelly to read, but after a while he give it back to me and says: "Not so good!" I asked him why and he says they ain't no pictures in it.

In all Judy's letters she kept kind of hinting that while she thinks I'm a nice fellow and all that business,