Again he towered out of his chair and over to her. Her small hand was gripped in his big one as she arose to meet him, and after a fair, straight look into the eyes between them, both glanced unconsciously at the clasped hands. She felt that she had never been more aware that she was a woman. The s.e.x emphasis of those two hands--the soft and fragile feminine and the heavy, muscular masculine--was startling. Glendon was the first to speak.
"You could be hurt so easily," he said; and at the same time she felt the firmness of his grip almost caressingly relax.
She remembered the old Prussian king"s love for giants, and laughed at the incongruity of the thought-a.s.sociation as she withdrew her hand.
"I am glad you came here to-day," he said, then hurried on awkwardly to make an explanation which the warm light of admiration in his eyes belied. "I mean because maybe you have opened my eyes to the crooked dealing that has been going on."
"You have surprised me," she urged. "It seemed to me that it is so generally understood that prize-fighting is full of crookedness, that I cannot understand how you, one of its chief exponents, could be ignorant of it. I thought as a matter of course that you would know all about it, and now you have convinced me that you never dreamed of it. You must be different from other fighters."
He nodded his head.
"That explains it, I guess. And that"s what comes of keeping away from it--from the other fighters, and promoters, and sports. It was easy to pull the wool over my eyes. Yet it remains to be seen whether it has really been pulled over or not. You see, I am going to find out for myself."
"And change it?" she queried, rather breathlessly, convinced somehow that he could do anything he set out to accomplish.
"No; quit it," was his answer. "If it isn"t straight I won"t have anything more to do with it. And one thing is certain: this coming fight with Nat Powers won"t end in the sixteenth round. If there is any truth in that editor"s tip, they"ll all be fooled. Instead of putting him out in the sixteenth, I"ll let the fight run on into the twenties. You wait and see."
"And I"m not to tell the editor?"
She was on her feet now, preparing to go.
"Certainly not. If he is only guessing, let him take his chances. And if there"s anything rotten about it he deserves to lose all he bets. This is to be a little secret between you and me. I"ll tell you what I"ll do. I"ll name the round to you. I won"t run it into the twenties. I"ll stop Nat Powers in the eighteenth."
"And I"ll not whisper it," she a.s.sured him.
"I"d like to ask you a favor," he said tentatively. "Maybe it"s a big favor."
She showed her acquiescence in her face, as if it were already granted, and he went on: "Of course, I know you won"t use this faking in the interview. But I want more than that. I don"t want you to publish anything at all.
She gave him a quick look with her searching gray eyes, then surprised herself by her answer.
"Certainly," she said. "It will not be published. I won"t write a line of it."
"I knew it," he said simply.
For the moment she was disappointed by the lack of thanks, and the next moment she was glad that he had not thanked her. She sensed the different foundation he was building under this meeting of an hour with her, and she became daringly explorative.
"How did you know it?" she asked.
"I don"t know." He shook his head. "I can"t explain it. I knew it as a matter of course. Somehow it seems to me I know a lot about you and me."
"But why not publish the interview? As your manager says, it is good advertising."
"I know it," he answered slowly. "But I don"t want to know you that way. I think it would hurt if you should publish it. I don"t want to think that I knew you professionally. I"d like to remember our talk here as a talk between a man and a woman."
As he spoke, in his eyes was all the expression with which a man looks at a woman. She felt the force and beat of him, and she felt strangely tongue-tied and awkward before this man who had been reputed tongue-tied and awkward. He could certainly talk straighter to the point and more convincingly than most men, and what struck her most forcibly was her own inborn certainty that it was mere nave and simple frankness on his part and not a practised artfulness.
He saw her in to her machine, and gave her another thrill when he said good-by. Once again their hands were clasped as he said: "Some day I"ll see you again. I want to see you again. Somehow I have a feeling that the last word has not been said between us."
And as the machine rolled away she was aware of a similar feeling. She had not seen the last of this very disquieting Pat Glendon, king of the bruisers and abysmal brute.
Back in the training quarters, Glendon encountered his perturbed manager.
"What did you fire me out for?" Stubener demanded. "We"re finished. A h.e.l.l of a mess you"ve made. You"ve never stood for meeting a reporter alone before, and now you"ll see when that interview comes out."
Glendon, who had been regarding him with cool amus.e.m.e.nt, made as if to turn and pa.s.s on, and then changed his mind.
"It won"t come out," he said.
Stubener looked up sharply.
"I asked her not to," Glendon explained.
Then Stubener exploded.
"As if she"d kill a juicy thing like that."
Glendon become very cold and his voice was harsh and grating.
"It won"t be published. She told me so. And to doubt it is to call her a liar."
The Irish flame was in his eyes, and by that, and by the unconscious clenching of his pa.s.sion-wrought hands, Stubener, who knew the strength of them, and of the man he faced, no longer dared to doubt.
CHAPTER VII.
It did not take Stubener long to find out that Glendon intended extending the distance of the fight, though try as he would he could get no hint of the number of the round. He wasted no time, however, and privily clinched certain arrangements with Nat Powers and Nat Powers" manager. Powers had a faithful following of bettors, and the betting syndicate was not to be denied its harvest.
On the night of the fight, Maud Sangster was guilty of a more daring unconventionality than any she had yet committed, though no whisper of it leaked out to shock society. Under the protection of the editor, she occupied a ring-side seat. Her hair and most of her face were hidden under a slouch hat, while she wore a man"s long overcoat that fell to her heels. Entering in the thick of the crowd, she was not noticed; nor did the newspaper men, in the press seats against the ring directly in front of her, recognize her.
As was the growing custom, there were no preliminary bouts, and she had barely gained her seat when roars of applause announced the arrival of Nat Powers. He came down the aisle in the midst of his seconds, and she was almost frightened by the formidable bulk of him. Yet he leaped the ropes as lightly as a man half his weight, and grinned acknowledgement to the tumultuous greeting that arose from all the house. He was not pretty. Two cauliflower ears attested his profession and its attendant brutality, while his broken nose had been so often spread over his face as to defy the surgeon"s art to reconstruct it.
Another uproar heralded the arrival of Glendon, and she watched him eagerly as he went through the ropes to his corner. But it was not until the tedious time of announcements, introductions, and challenges was over, that the two men threw off their wraps and faced each other in ring costume. Concentrated upon them from overhead was the white glare of many electric lights--this for the benefit of the moving picture cameras; and she felt, as she looked at the two sharply contrasted men, that it was in Glendon that she saw the thoroughbred and in Powers the abysmal brute. Both looked their parts--Glendon, clean cut in face and form, softly and ma.s.sively beautiful, Powers almost asymmetrically rugged and heavily matted with hair.
As they made their preliminary pose for the cameras, confronting each other in fighting att.i.tudes, it chanced that Glendon"s gaze dropped down through the ropes and rested on her face. Though he gave no sign, she knew, with a swift leap of the heart, that he had recognized her. The next moment the gong sounded, the announcer cried "Let her go!" and the battle was on.
It was a good fight. There was no blood, no marring, and both were clever. Half of the first round was spent in feeling each other out, but Maud Sangster found the play and feint and tap of the gloves sufficiently exciting. During some of the fiercer rallies in later stages of the fight, the editor was compelled to touch her arm to remind her who she was and where she was.
Powers fought easily and cleanly, as became the hero of half a hundred ring battles, and an admiring claque applauded his every cleverness. Yet he did not unduly exert himself save in occasional strenous rallies that brought the audience yelling to its feet in the mistaken notion that he was getting his man.
It was at such a moment, when her unpractised eye could not inform her that Glendon was escaping serious damage, that the editor leaned to her and said: "Young Pat will win all right. He"s a comer, and they can"t stop him. But he"ll win in the sixteenth and not before."
"Or after?" she asked.
She almost laughed at the cert.i.tude of her companion"s negative. She knew better.
Powers was noted for hunting his man from moment to moment and round to round, and Glendon was content to accede to this program. His defense was admirable, and he threw in just enough of offense to whet the edge of the audience"s interest. Though he knew he was scheduled to lose, Powers had had too long a ring experience to hesitate from knocking his man out if the opportunity offered. He had had the double cross worked too often on him to be chary in working it on others. If he got his chance he was prepared to knock his man out and let the syndicate go hang. Thanks to clever press publicity, the idea was prevalent that at last Young Glendon had met his master. In his heart, Powers, however, knew that it was himself who had encountered the better man. More than once, in the faster in-fighting, he received the weight of punches that he knew had been deliberately made no heavier. On Glendon"s part, there were times and times when a slip or error of judgement could have exposed him to one of his antagonist"s sledge-hammer blows and lost the fight. Yet his was that almost miraculous power of accurate timing and distancing, and confidence was not shaken by several close shaves he experienced. He had never lost a fight, never been knocked down, and he had always been thoroughly the master of the man he faced, that such a possibility was unthinkable.
At the end of the fifteenth round, both men were in good condition, though Powers was breathing a trifle heavily and there were men in the ringside seats offering odds that he would "blow up."
It was just before the gong for the sixteenth round struck that Stubener, leaning over Glendon from behind in his corner, whispered: "Are you going to get him now?"
Glendon, with a back toss of his head, shook it and laughed mockingly up into his manager"s anxious face.
With the stroke of the gong for the sixteenth round, Glendon was surprised to see Powers cut loose. From the first second it was a tornado of fighting, and Glendon was hard put to escape serious damage. He blocked, clinched, ducked, sidestepped, was rushed backward against the ropes and was met by fresh rushes when he surged out to center. Several times Powers left inviting openings, but Glendon refused to loose the lighting-bolt of a blow that would drop his man. He was reserving that blow for two rounds later. Not in the whole fight had he ever exerted his full strength, nor struck with the force that was in him.
For two minutes, without the slightest let-up, Powers went at him hammer and tongs. In another minute the round would be over and the betting snydicate hard hit. But that minute was not to be. They had just come together in the center of the ring. It was as ordinary a clinch as any in the fight, save that Powers was struggling and roughing it every instant. Glendon whipped his left over in a crisp but easy jolt to the side of the face. It was like any of a score of similar jolts he had already delivered in the course of the fight. To his amazement he felt Powers go limp in his arms and begin sinking to the floor on sagging, spraddling legs that refused to bear his weight. He struck the floor with a thump, rolled half over on his side, and lay with closed eyes and motionless. The referee, bending above him, was shouting the count.
At the cry of "Nine!" Powers quivered as if making a vain effort to rise.
"Ten!--and out!" cried the referee.
He caught Glendon"s hand and raised it aloft to the roaring audience in token that he was the winner.
For the first time in the ring, Glendon was dazed. It had not been a knockout blow. He could stake his life on that. It had not been to the jaw but to the side of the face, and he knew it had gone there and nowhere else. Yet the man was out, had been counted out, and he had faked it beautifully. That final thump on the floor had been a convincing masterpiece. To the audience it was indubitably a knockout, and the moving picture machines would perpetuate the lie. The editor had called the turn after all, and a crooked turn it was.
Glendon shot a swift glance through the ropes to the face of Maud Sangster. She was looking straight at him, but her eyes were bleak and hard, and there was neither recognition nor expression in them. Even as he looked, she turned away unconcernedly and said something to the man beside her.
Power"s seconds were carrying him to his corner, a seeming limp wreck of a man. Glendon"s seconds were advancing upon him to congratulate him and to remove his gloves. But Stubener was ahead of them. His face was beaming as he caught Glendon"s right glove in both his hands and cried: "Good boy, Pat. I knew you"d do it."
Glendon pulled his glove away. And for the first time in the years they had been together, his manager heard him swear.
"You go to h.e.l.l," he said, and turned to hold out his hands for his seconds to pull off the gloves.
CHAPTER VIII.
That night, after receiving the editor"s final dictum that there was not a square fighter in the game, Maud Sangster cried quietly for a moment on the edge of her bed, grew angry, and went to sleep hugely disgusted with herself, prize-fighters, and the world in general.
The next afternoon she began work on an interview with Henry Addison that was destined never to be finished. It was in the private room that was accorded her at the "Courier-Journal" office that the thing happened. She had paused in her writing to glance at a headline in the afternoon paper announcing that Glendon was matched with Tom Cannam, when one of the door-boys brought in a card. It was Glendon"s.
"Tell him I can"t be seen," she told the boy.
In a minute he was back.
"He says he"s coming in anyway, but he"d rather have permission."
"Did you tell him I was busy?" she asked.
"Yes"m, but he said he was coming just the same."
She made no answer, and the boy, his eyes shining with admiration for the importunate visitor, rattled on.
"I know"m. He"s a awful big guy. If he started roughhousing he could clean the whole office out. He"s young Glendon, who won the fight last night."
"Very well, then. Bring him in. We don"t want the office cleaned out, you know."
No greetings were exchanged when Glendon entered. She was as cold and inhospitable as a gray day, and neither invited him to a chair nor recognized him with her eyes, sitting half turned away from him at her desk and waiting for him to state his business. He gave no sign of how this cavalier treatment affected him, but plunged directly into his subject.
"I want to talk to you," he said shortly. "That fight. It did not end in that round."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"I knew it would."
"You did n"t," he retorted. "You did n"t. I did n"t."
She turned and looked at him with quiet affection of boredom.
"What is the use?" she asked. "Prize-fighting is prize-fighting, and we all know what it means. The fight did end in the round I told you it would."
"It did," he agreed. "But you didn"t know it would. In all the world you and I were at least two that knew Powers wouldn"t be knocked out in the sixteenth."
She remained silent.
"I say you knew he would n"t." He spoke peremptorily, and, when she still declined to speak, stepped nearer to her. "Answer me," he commanded.
She nodded her head.
"But he was," she insisted.
"He was n"t. He wasn"t knocked out at all. Do you get that? I am going to tell you about it, and you are going to listen. I didn"t lie to you. Do you get that? I didn"t lie to you. I was a fool, and they fooled me, and you along with me. You thought you saw him knocked out. Yet the blow I struck was not heavy enough. It didn"t hit him in the right place either. He made believe it did. He faked that knockout."
He paused and looked at her expectantly. And somehow, with a leap and thrill, she knew that she believed him, and she felt pervaded by a warm happiness at the reinstatement of this man who meant nothing to her and whom she had seen but twice in her life.
"Well?" he demanded, and she thrilled anew at the compellingness of him.
She stood up, and her hand went out to his.
"I believe you," she said. "And I am glad, most glad."
It was a longer grip than she had antic.i.p.ated. He looked at her with eyes that burned and to which her own unconsciously answered back. Never was there such a man, was her thought. Her eyes dropped first, and his followed, so that, as before, both gazed at the clasped hands. He made a movement of his whole body toward her, impulsive and involuntary, as if to gather her to him, then checked himself abruptly, with an unmistakable effort. She saw it, and felt the pull of his hand as it started to draw her to him. And to her amazement she felt the desire to yield, the desire almost overwhelmingly to be drawn into the strong circle of those arms. And had he compelled, she knew that she would not have refrained. She was almost dizzy, when he checked himself and with a closing of his fingers that half crushed hers, dropped her hand, almost flung it from him.
"G.o.d!" he breathed. "You were made for me."