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 "It was your canny matchmaking, whole-hearted en couragement and the shrewd advice and training you gave me that took me as far as I am now! It was also you who bullied the promoters into giving me the guarantees I've been getting and got my price raised from two hundred a bout to five hundred and more a round. I'm not going to cast you aside now, just when there's a chance for you to cash in on your efforts. No, we'll stick together until the finish and keep the split at fifty-fifty, old man. You're earning your share as much as I earn mine. Why, if I couldn't look over when the going gets rough and see you in my corner, I'd be as helpless as a rudderless ship! As you say, we've been pals—and pals don't break over money. We don't need a contract. I'm sure our friendship is stronger than any legal sheet of paper. Let's continue as we have been doing on a—a—gentlemen's agreement. Does that hit you all right?"

Did it hit me all right? I'll ejaculate it did! Imagine a blue-corpuscled, classy, inlaid in the decanter aristocrat like him, intimatin' out loud that I am what is known as a gentleman. Sweet Mamma, should he of gave me a hundred thousand bucks right then, I wouldn't of felt no better!

Well, about ten days later we are out on the boundin' billows on the en route to King George's home town, and they ain't no hospital and few cemeteries in the world containin' a guy one-fifth as sick as me. For three days I was a object which would of aroused pity in the chest of a Bowery loan shark, and I accumulated some doubts about Columbus discoverin' America,