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 my wildest nightmares, and I was over to the hotel she phoned me from in one runnin' jump. In the lobby I bump into "Honest Joe" Hammond, which, with a bunch of other globe-trotters in his line, is makin' book on the fight.

"What about this muss?" he says, pullin' me aside before I can duck him. "I'm layin' three to one Roberts cops, but I'm gettin' a big play from some American and English jobbies on this Gournet guy. It don't sound reasonable. Are you levelin' with the Kid in this one?"

"We level in all of 'em!" I says. "You see what's goin' on, and you know as much as I do. The Kid's gone cuckoo and ain't trained a day—that's the low down between you and me—but we have cooked nothin' up. Would I be liable to lay down to this Frog with a crack at the world's title in sight? The Kid ain't in condition, but—"

"I don't care if he's on crutches!" butts in "Honest Joe." "If you're tryin', that's all I wanna know. So far I'll go to the cleaners for sixty thousand men if Kid Roberts don't ash home in front. So you can see!"

I reached in my pocket and handed him a roll of fifteen one-thousand-buck notes, or "grands," as them addicted to slang calls 'em.

"Bet this for me, Joe," I says, "at them 3 to 1 odds you was talkin' about, and take 2 per cent of the loot for your commission. How 'bout that?"

"Honest Joe" merely scribbled a receipt, gimme it, grinned, and drifted away.

An hour later me and Miss Dolores Brewster is in the world's famous casino where every time the roulette wheel stops spinnin' somebody goes cuckoo