Page:The Leather Pushers (1921).pdf/139

 a idea of how valuable a manager is to one of them babes in arms, hey?

I went to look for Dummy to break the bad news to him, and found he had waited himself away to New Orleans to get things under way for the brawl: but whilst threadin' through Times Square I bump into no less than Jack Easton, the champion's manager. Jacques had unquestionably excavated a joint where they thought the Eighteenth Amendment was a vaudeville act, and he was lit up like Broadway at eight in the p. m. From the welcome he gimme I could of been his father. After we have exchanged the usual lies about how we are makin' out, Jack won't have it no other way but that I step around to his oasis and knock over a powder with him, and I—well, you know how weak the average man is! Besides, I figured here was a good chance to get some inside dope on the champ's condition and the etc. So we duck around the corner to this den of iniquity, and after we have sneaked a couple past our pleasantly surprised tonsils, Jack gets exceedin'ly talkative.

"C'mon!" he says, weavin' back and forth in front of me. "Lesh lap up large quantities of hooch! I'm looser'en a pail of ashes to-day—gonna sign a seventy-five-thousan'—'scuse me—movie contract for the Big Feller in the mornin'."

"Well, Jack, go to it," I says. "You better take them movie guys whilst the takin' is good, because next year I'll be handlin' a champion!"

"Humph!" he mutters. "You're gonna han'le—gonna han'le shamp, heh? Stop kiddin' yourself, stop kiddin'—'scuse me, mush have caught the hecups from