in dress suit or ring togs, always had a million dollars' worth of personality and was a highly popular champion when he held the title, whilst Jim Oliver had as many friends as the flu. Then, again, everything connected with Kid Roberts made him what the sport writers calls "good copy." The swell family he come from, his partin' from his society-leader wife, his record when he was a milk-fed college boy at Yale, what he done for his old man, etc., all furnished stuff "Constant Reader" likes.
After readin' about us for a couple of days, the New York fight promoters got busy. Wild to cash in on the notoriety he was gettin', they want to stage a scuffle between Kid Roberts and Jim Oliver without further ado. But even though they offered us fifty thousand bucks for our end with the privilege of a percentage, I wouldn't let my boy go in there with the champion then, and that's all there was to it!
A few weeks later Kid Roberts is doin' road work through Central Park with Ptomaine Joe to keep in condition for a couple of brawls I'm linin' up, when, lo and behold, as they say in Pittsburgh, we crash right into Désirée Collet and her father at the lake. I knew that Désirée thought Kid Roberts was all the men in the wide, wide world, and that makes me plenty uneasy. Young and good-lookin' enough to bust up anybody's peace of mind, Désirée was about as harmless as dynamite, the way matters shapes up to me.
Anyways, this meetin' was a regular movin' picture. Désirée and her father is havin' a battle with a hard-boiled taxi driver when we arrive on the scene. Pto-
