Page:The Leather Pushers (1921).pdf/173

 The Kid glanced up, kinda puzzled. "I—why—I don't know, I'm sure," he says. "Unless—well, the first punch I landed in this round caught him square on the open mouth. It may be that I loosened one of his teeth and he's drawing on it to get it loose enough to—"

"To get rid of it, to get rid of it!" I hollers. "Just what I had doped out! Now listen to every word I'm gonna say, because it means a quick knockout if you folley my instructions. Pay no attention to any part of this tramp but his mouth! That tooth's gettin' looser and looser and pretty soon it'll come all the ways out and—get this now—he'll turn his face for a second to spit it out! Get that? He'll have to turn his face to one side; it's a natural movement. You keep watchin' him suck away on that tooth. When he turns his face to get rid of it, be set to let him have the right on the button. It's a fifty to one shot, but if you connect, you're heavyweight champion of England!"

The Kid's eyes flashed and he reached a glove for my hand and shook it silently, but hard enough to make it ache for a week. Then the bell brought him off his stool to the center of the ring, where Bandsman Shayne begin peckin' away at his sore eye with the flashiest left I've seen since Jack Johnson's. The Kid snapped over a wallop now and then, but his one good eye was glued to the Bandsman's puckerin' lips, and his deadly right, flickin' back and forth, was ready for immediate use. Suddenly they both started a rally at the same time in mid ring, and after Roberts had drove Shayne's head back six times without a return