Page:The Leather Pushers (1921).pdf/165

 Kid was scourin' Blighty with a vacuum cleaner in a effort to find Dolores Brewster. Bandsman Shayne was likewise among those absent at the signin' of the articles, the pugilistic pride of England bein' tourin' the outlands as a vaudeville attraction. So the young men didn't meet when us managers convened at the National Sportin' Club and, over a couple of seidels of the stuff the Anti-Saloon League made famous, accepted a purse of four thousand pounds for the massacre, to be split so per cent to the winner and 40 per cent to the guy they carried out. Bandsman Shayne's manager was a tall, slim, walrus-whiskered baby which packed a shifty eye and mixed a mean highball. He looked, talked, and acted like the undefeated champion boob of the world, and that's what I figured him. Oo la la, what a awakenin' I got!

Well, the Kid took to his trainin' like Mary Pickford took to a camera and within a week I was practically out of sparrin' partners. Cut to the quick by the charmin' Miss Brewster havin' gave him the raspberry, he went around snarlin' and growlin' like a peeved bear, and he seemed to get a lot of relief by batterin' his handlers from pillar to post.

I found handlers as scarce in and around Hampstead Heath as silence is in a locomotive works, and when about ten days before the fight a big husky strolls into our camp and asks for a job I could of kissed him, and for all I know I did! This boy was one tough-lookin' baby and he had "I-can-take-it!" wrote all over him. He was a good fifteen pounds heavier than my 195 ringside Kid Roberts and fully