the back. "I—I beg your pardon for losing my temper. I'm so infernally anxious to get back to New York that I— Oh, hang it, man—I've simply got to be there by the end of the week!"
He walks over to the window and stares out at Sandusky, tappin' a nervous foot on the floor and bitin' his lip. I stretched out comfortably on the so-called bed and give forth the impression that I was readin' the mornin' paper. In the reality I was watchin' him. I liked that kid—you couldn't help it! He got closer to me in the time we punched, argued, stalled, and lucked our way into a world's championship than any fighter I ever had in my stable. Big, clean, and as pleasin' to the eye as a sunset anywheres west of Chicago, his whole appearance fairly shrieked class! He looked as much like a prize fighter—then—as I resemble Mary Pickford, and I knew he was doin' a piece of deep thinkin' as he stood there at that window lookin' through the greasy panes out into the dirty little alley which run back of this alleged hotel. Think of the stuff that must of been gallopin' through that high-strung kid's mind. He'd been the most popular guy in his college, a kind of a tin god to the other birds which had carried him off on their shoulders from dozens of tracks and football fields. He'd run through as many pieces of eight as Captain Kidd ever seen; he'd belonged to clubs where even the waiters hadda be descended from deck hands on the Mayflower; he'd been used to evenin' clothes, soft lights, music, and the maddenin' smiles of pretty women, after 6 p. m., instead of a pair of trunks and boxin' gloves and
