"How did he come by that scratch?" said Mamie, coldly sticking to her point.
"I"ll tell you quick enough. But let"s start in on the eats first. You wouldn"t keep a coming champ waiting for his grub, would you? Look how he"s lamping that candy."
"Were you going to let the poor mite stuff himself with candy, Steve Dingle?"
"Sure. Whatever he says goes. He owns the joint after this afternoon."
Mamie swiftly removed the unwholesome delicacy.
"The idea!"
Kirk was busying himself with the chafing-dish.
"What have you got in here, Steve?"
"Lobster, colonel. I had to do thirty miles to get it, too."
Mamie looked at him fixedly.
"Were you going to feed lobster to this child?" she asked with ominous calm. "Were you intending to put him to bed full of broiled lobster and marshmallows?"
"Nix on the rough stuff, Mamie," pleaded the embarra.s.sed pugilist. "How was I to know what kids feed on? And maybe he would have pa.s.sed up the lobster at that and stuck to the sardines."
"Sardines!"
"Ain"t kids allowed sardines?" said Steve anxiously. "The guy at the store told me they were wholesome and nourishing. It looked to me as if that ought to hit young Fitzsimmons about right. What"s the matter with them?"
"A little bread-and-milk is all that he ever has before he goes to bed."
Steve detected a flaw in this and hastened to make his point.
"Sure," he said, "but he don"t win the bantam-weight champeenship of Connecticut every night."
"Is that what he"s done to-day, Steve?" asked Kirk.
"It certainly is. Ain"t I telling you?"
"That"s the trouble. You"re not. You and Mamie seem to be having a discussion about the nourishing properties of sardines and lobster.
What has been happening this afternoon?"
"Bad boy," remarked William Bannister with his mouth full.
"That"s right," said Steve. "That"s it in a nutsh.e.l.l. Say, it was this way. It seemed to me that, having no kid of his own age to play around with, his nibs was apt to get lonesome, so I asked about and found that there was a guy of the name of Whiting living near here who had a kid of the same age or thereabouts. Maybe you remember him? He used to fight at the feather-weight limit some time back. Called himself Young O"Brien. He was a pretty good sc.r.a.pper in his time, and now he"s up here looking after some gent"s prize dogs.
"Well, I goes to him and borrows his kid. He"s a sc.r.a.ppy sort of kid at that and weighs ten pounds more than his nibs; but I reckoned he"d have to do, and I thought I could stay around and part "em if they got to mixing it."
Mamie uttered an indignant exclamation, but Kirk"s eyes were gleaming proudly.
"Well?" he said.
Steve swallowed lobster and resumed.
"Well, you know how it is. You meet a guy who"s been in the same line of business as yourself and you find you"ve got a heap to talk about.
I"d never happened across the gink Whiting, but I knew of him, and, of course, he"d heard of me, and we got to discussing things. I seen him lose on a foul to Tommy King in the eighteenth round out in Los Angeles, and that kept us busy talking, him having it that he hadn"t gone within a mile of fouling Tommy and me saying I"d been in a ring-seat and had the goods on him same as if I"d taken a snap-shot.
Well, we was both getting pretty hot under the collar about it when suddenly there"s the blazes of a noise behind us, and there"s the two kids sc.r.a.pping all over the lot. The Whiting kid had started it, mind you, and him ten pounds heavier than Bill, and tough, too."
The White Hope confirmed this.
"Bad boy," he remarked, and with a deep breath resumed excavating work on a grapefruit.
"Well, I was just making a jump to separate them when this Whiting gook says, "Betcha a dollar my kid wins!" and before I knew what I was doing I"d taken him. It wasn"t that that stopped me, though. It was his saying that his kid took after his dad and could eat up anything of his own age in America. Well, darn it, could I take that from a slob of a mixed-ale sc.r.a.pper when it was handed out at the finest kid that ever came from New York?"
"Of course not," said Kirk indignantly, and even Mamie forbore to criticize. She bent over the White Hope and gave his grapefruit-stained cheek a kiss.
"Well, I _should_ say not!" cried Steve. "I just hollered to his nibs, "Soak it to him, kid! for the honour of No. 99"; and, believe me, the young bear-cat sort of gathered himself together, winked at me, and began to hammer the stuffing out of the sc.r.a.ppy kid. Say, there wasn"t no sterilized stuff about his work. You were a regular germ, all right, weren"t you squire?"
"Germ," agreed the White Hope. He spoke drowsily.
"Gee!" Steve resumed his saga in a whirl of enthusiasm. "Gee! if they"re right to start with, if they"re born right, if they"ve got the grit in them, you can"t sterilize it out of "em if you use up half the germ-killer in the country. From the way that kid acted you"d have thought he"d been spending the last year in a training-camp. The other kid rolled him over, but he come up again as if that was just the sort of stuff he liked, and pretty soon I see that he"s uncovered a yellow streak in the Whiting kid as big as a barn door. You were on it, weren"t you, colonel?"
But the White Hope had no remarks to offer this time. His head had fallen forward and was resting peacefully in his grapefruit.
"He"s asleep," said Mamie.
She picked him up gently and carried him out.
"He"s a champeen at that too," said Steve. "I had to pull him out of the hay this morning. Well, I guess he"s earned it. He"s had a busy day."
"What happened then, Steve?"
"Why, after that there wasn"t a thing to it. Whiting, poor simp, couldn"t see it. "Betcha ten dollars my kid wins," he hollers. "He"s got him going." "Take you," I shouts; and at that moment the sc.r.a.ppy kid sees it"s all over, so he does the old business of fouling, same as his pop done when he fought Tommy King. It"s in the blood, I guess. He takes and scratches poor Bill on the cheek."
"That was enough for me. I jumps in. "All over," I says. "My kid wins on a foul." "Foul nothing," says Whiting. "It was an accident, and you lose because you jumped into the fight, same as Connie McVey did when Corbett fought Sharkey. Think you can get away with it, pulling that old-time stuff?" I didn"t trouble to argue with him. "Oh," I says, "is that it? Say, just take a slant at your man. If you don"t stop him quick he"ll be in Texas."
"For the sc.r.a.ppy kid was beating it while the going was good and was half a mile away, running hard. Well, that was enough even for the Whiting guy. "I guess we"ll call it a draw," he says, "and all bets off." I just looks at him and says, quite civil and polite: "You darned half-baked slob of a rough-house sc.r.a.pper," I says, "it ain"t a draw or anything like it. My kid wins, and I"ll trouble you now to proceed to cash in with the dough, or else I"m liable to start something." So he paid up, and I took the White Hope indoors and give him a wash and brush-up, and we cranks up the bubble and hikes off to the town and spends the money on getting food for the celebration supper. And what"s over I slips into the kid"s pocket and says: "That"s your first winner"s end, kid, and you"ve earned it.""
Steve paused and filled his gla.s.s.
"I"m on the waggon as a general thing nowadays," he said; "but I reckon this an occasion. Right here is where we drink his health."
And, overcome by his emotion, he burst into discordant song.
"Fo-or he"s a jolly good fellow," bellowed Steve. "For he"s a jolly good fellow. For he"s--"
There was a sound of quick footsteps outside, and Mamie entered the room like a small whirlwind.
"Be quiet!" she cried. "Do you want to wake him?"
"Wake him?" said Steve. "You can"t wake that kid with dynamite."