Page:The Leather Pushers (1921).pdf/103

 place, the hardest fight in a box-fighter's career is his first quarrel after he's been knocked out. You generally pick nothin' but tramps for him all over again, gradually gettin' his confidence back—but to rush a green kid right in again against the baby that's flattened him is absolutely idiotic, nine times outa ten. If your boy's a champ, or you got a agreement with the other guy, it's different. I had neither a champ or a agreement.

So, as I looked across our room at the Kid pacin' up and down like the inmate of the panther's cage at the zoo, I decided it was us back to the bushes again for a space, battlin' bums and sellin' tickets for the battles on a commission in the lew of a guaranteed purse.

"Well, Kid," I says fin'ly, "drag out the old suit case and we'll vamp away for the sticks. We gotta start all over again, several feet below the bottom, and jab our way back to where we was when you fell into that wallop from Kennedy. It's tough, but—"

He swung around on me like a flash. "What do you mean?" he says. "I thought you had secured me a return bout with Al Kennedy?"

Pretty good for the Kid, hey? Wantin' to step right out again with the first guy which had knocked him for a goal. The boy had heart, what?

"I had matched you with Kennedy again," I says, "but said bout is all off now!"

"He crawled out of it, eh?" he snarls, bangin' his fist down on the bureau. "Robbed me of my chance to win back the—"

"No," I interrupts, "he didn't crawl out of it.