And that brought me back to his chin--back to that big, oozing cut. I had been waiting for an opportunity to ask him about it, and didn't know myself how to go about it. Just from that you can realize how he had me guessing, for it takes quite some jolt to make me coy. So I followed his own lead finally and blurted the question right out, without any fancy conversational tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, and he told me how it had happened.

"One of his horses had kicked him. You look as though you could have guessed it yourself! He didn't tell you, did he, Flash? No-o-o? Well, that was it. He said he had gone blundering in on them the night before, to feed, without speaking to them in the darkness. It isn't hard to guess what had made him absent-minded that night. You can't know, just from seeing it now, how bad that fresh cut was, either. It looked bad enough to lay any man out, and I told him so. But he said he had managed to feed his horses just the same--he'd worked them pretty hard that week in the timber!

"It wasn't merely what he said, you see; it was the way he said it.

I've made more fuss before now over pounding my finger with a tack hammer. And I did a lot of talking myself in that next minute or two.

A man can say a whole lot that is almost worth while when he talks strictly to himself. It wasn't alone the fact that he had been able to get back on his feet and keep on traveling after a blow that would have caved in most men's skulls that hit me so hard. The recollection of what his eyes had been like that night before, when he had handed the Judge the lie without even opening his lips, helped too--and the way he shut his mouth, there on the station platform, when I gave him an opening to say his little say concerning the village in general. He just smiled, Flash, a slow sort of a smile, and never said a word.

"Man, he knew how to take punishment! Oh, don't doubt that! I realized right then that he had been taking it for years, ever since they had counted his father out, with the whole house yelling for the stuff to get him, too. He'd been hanging on, hoping for a fluke to save him.

He'd been hanging on, and he didn't squeal, either, while he was doing it. Not--one--yip--out--of--him!

"So I made him give me back the card and I wrote the rest of this stuff across the back of it. And again I'll tell you, Flash, right now, I'm not sure why I did it. But I'll tell you, too, just as I told myself a few mornings ago, back there on that village station platform, that if I were Jed The Red and I had my choice, I wouldn't choose to go up against a man who had been waiting five years for an opening to swing. No--I would not! For he's quite likely to do more or less damage. I never thought he'd turn up, and I don't know whether I am sorry or not. But now that he's here, what are you going to do about it?

"It's my fault, but whatever you do I want to ask you not to do one thing. I want you to promise not to try to make a fool of the boy, Flash? You're, well--a little bit merciless on some of 'em, you know.

It's not his fault, and I--why, d.a.m.n it, I haven't met a man in years I like as I do that big, quiet, lonesome kid! Now, there's your story.

It explains the whole thing, and my apologies go with it. What are you going to do?"

CHAPTER XV

Jesse Hogarty had been listening without moving a muscle--without once taking his two brilliant eyes from Morehouse's warm face--even when Morehouse refused to look back at him as he talked.

"'Introducing The Pilgrim,'" he murmured to himself, after a moment of silence, and the professor of English accent could not have been more perfect, "The Pilgrim! Hum-m-m, surely! And a really excellent name for publicity purposes, too. It--it fits the man."

Then he threw back his head--he came suddenly to his feet, to pace twice the length of the room and back, before he remembered. When he reseated himself he was gnawing his lip as if vexed that he had showed even that much lack of self-control. And once more he buried the point of his chin in his hands.

"Do, Chub?" he picked up the other's question silkily. "What am I going to do? Well, I believe I am going to pay my debts at last. I think I am going to settle a little score that has stood so long against me that it had nearly cost me my self-respect."

That lightning-like change swept his face again, twisting his lips nastily, stamping all his features with something totally bad. The man who had never been whipped by any man, from the day he won his first brawl in the gutter, showed through the veneer that was no thicker than the funereal black and white garb he wore, no deeper than his superficially polished utterance which he had acquired from long contact with those who had been born to it.

"I'm going to pay my debts," he slurred the words dangerously, "pay them with the same coin that Dennison slipped to me two years ago!"

Little by little Morehouse's head came forward at the mention of that name. It was of Dennison that the plump newspaper man had been subconsciously thinking ever since he had entered Hogarty's immaculate little office; it was of Dennison that he always thought whenever he saw that bad light kindling in the ex-lightweight's eyes. Dennison was the promoter who had backed Jed The Red from the day when the latter had fought his first fight.

And, "You don't mean," he faltered, "Flash, you don't mean that you think that boy can stop----"

Hogarty's thin voice bit in and cut him short.

"Think?" he demanded. "Think? I don't have to think any more! I know!"

For a second he seemed to be pondering something; then he threw up his head again. And his startlingly sudden burst of laughter made Morehouse wince a little.

"Don't make a fool of him, Chub?" he croaked. "Be merciful with the boy! Man, you're half an hour late! I did my best. Oh, I'm bad--I know just how bad I can be, when I try. But he called me! Yes, that's what he did--he as much as told me that I wasn't giving him a chance to get his cards on the table. So I ran him up against Sutton. And I did more than that. I told Boots to get him--told him to beat him to death--and I meant it, too! And do you know what happened? Could you guess? Well, I'll tell you and save you time.

"He went in and took enough punishment from Boots in that first round to make any man stop and think. He put up the worst exhibition I ever saw, just because he was trying to fight the way Ogden had coached him, instead of his own style. That was the first round; but it didn't take him very long to see where he had been wrong. There wasn't any second round--that is, not so that you could really notice it.

"He was waiting for the bell, and the gong just seemed to pick him up and drop him in the middle of the ring. And Sutton went to him--and he caught Boots coming in! Why, he just snapped his right over and straightened him up, and then stepped in and whipped across his left, and Boots went back into the ropes. He went back--and he stayed back!"

Swiftly, almost gutturally, Hogarty sketched it all out: Young Denny's calm statement of his errand, his own groundless burst of spleen, and the outcome of the try-out which had sent him hurrying back to Denny's dressing-room with many questions on his tongue's tip and a living hope in his brain which he hardly dared to nurse.

Hogarty even recalled and related the late delivery of the card of introduction which Morehouse was now nervously twisting into misshapen shreds and, word for word, repeated the boy's grave explanation of his reason for that tardiness.

"He bothered you, did he?" he asked. "Well, he had me guessing, too, right from the first word he spoke. There was something about him that left me wondering--thinking a little. But I'm understanding a whole lot better since you finished talking. You're right, too, Chub--you're all of that! Five years is a long time to wait for a chance to swing.

I ought to know--I've waited half that long myself. That was the way he started for Boots, that second round. Oh, it was deadly--it was mighty, mighty wicked. And now, to top it all, it's The Red for whom he was looking, too. I wish it wasn't so easy; I sure do! It's so simple I almost don't enjoy it. Almost--but not quite!"

Once more he shot to his feet and began pacing up and down the room.

Morehouse sat following him to and fro with his eyes, trying to comprehend each step of this bewildering development which was furthest of all from what he had expected. He had listened with his face fairly glowing with appreciation to the ex-lightweight's account of Denny's coming. It was all so entirely in keeping with what he had already known of him. But the glint died out of his eyes after a time; even his nervously active fingers stopped worrying the bit of cardboard on the table.

"Granted that he could turn the trick, Flash," he suggested at last, "even admitting that he might be able to stop Conway after a few months of training to help him out, do you suppose he'd be willing to hang around and fight his way up through the ranks, until he forced 'em to let him have his match? It's usually a two year's job, you know, at the very least.

"I don't know why, Flash, but somehow the more I think of it, the surer I grow that there is something more behind his wanting that fight than we know anything about. It isn't just a grudge; it isn't just because of the dirty deal which that village has been giving him, either. I've been wondering--I'm wondering right now why he asked me if that account of the purse was true or not. Because men don't fight the way you say he fought, Flash, just for money. They fight hard, I'll admit, but not that way!"

There was a living menace in Hogarty's steady tread up and down the room. He wheeled and crossed, turned and retraced his steps noiselessly, cat-footed in his low rubbed-shod shoes. And he turned a gaze that was almost pitying upon the plump man's objection.

"Two years--to get ready?" he asked softly. "Chub, do you think I'd wait two years--now? Why, two months is too long, and that is the outside limit which I'm allowing myself in this affair. You're a little slow, Chub--just a bit slow in grasping the possibilities, aren't you? Think a minute! Put your mind upon it, man! I've told you I am going to pay Dennison off--and pay him with the same coin that he handed me. Doesn't that mean anything at all?"

He stopped short, crossed to the table and stood with his fingertips bracketed upon its surface. Morehouse knew Hogarty--knew him as did few other men, unless, perhaps, it was those who, years before, had faced him in the ring. And at that moment Hogarty's eyes were mere slits in his face as he stood and peered down into the newspaper man's upturned features, his mouth like nothing so much as a livid scar above his chin. There was nothing of mirth in those eyes, nothing of merriment in that tight mouth, and yet as he sat and gazed back up at them, Morehouse's own lips began to twitch. They began to relax. That wide grin spread to the very corners of his eyelids and half hid his delighted comprehension behind a thousand tiny wrinkles.

"I wonder," he breathed, "I wonder now, Flash, if you are thinking about the same thing I am? For if you are--well, you're too sober faced. You are that! It's time to indulge in a little hysterics."

And he began to chuckle; he sat and shook with m.u.f.fled spasms of absolute joy as the thing became more and more vivid with each new thought. Even Hogarty's answering smile, coming from reluctant lips, had in it something of sympathetic mirth.

"That's just what I am thinking," he said. "Just that! It's what I meant when I said I was going to pay him--with his own coin. When a man plays another man crooked, he expects that other man to come back at him some day; he is looking for him to do that. But there is one thing he doesn't expect--not usually. He isn't looking for him to work the same old game. It is something new he's looking to guard against.

"And that is where Dennison is weak--in that spot and one other. He doesn't know even yet that when I fell for his game I fell hard enough to wake me up. He thinks I haven't a suspicion but what it was just an accident that laid Sutton out, two years back--just a lucky punch of The Red's that went across and spoiled our perfect frame-up. And he hasn't a suspicion that I know he was sure The Red was going to clean up Sutton, just as surely as they went to the ring together.

"That is where he is weak. When a man is a crook he wants to be a real crook--and a real one is suspicious of everybody, even of himself."

He lifted one hand and pounded gently upon the polished surface of the table.

"The old days are done--dead--when a man got his reputation, and a chance at the big ones simply by fighting his way up from the bottom.

I can give a man a bigger reputation in a week, with five thousand dollars' worth of real advertising, than he'd be able to get in a lifetime the old way. And training?----"

He jerked his head over one shoulder toward the dressing-rooms beyond the closed door.

"Right now he is just where I want him. Why, he looks like a pitiful dub if you hold him back. Order him to wait--and it's heart-breaking to watch him suffer. In one month I can teach him all he'll ever need to know about blocking and getting away. And the rest? Well, you'll get a chance to see just what happens when he really goes into action.

I tell you it makes you stop and think.

"And I don't care what _he_ is fighting for; I don't care what he wants. Pleasure or profit, it's all one to me. It's you I need most right now, Chub. I know you have always been a little particular about soiling your hands. A shady deal never appealed to me so much, either, but I'm not exactly bashful about this one. That part of it will be my own private affair. You handle the publicity end--merely hail Bolton as a comer, when the time is ripe. Are you--are you in on it?"

Morehouse thoughtfully scratched his head.

"I have been a trifle fastidious, haven't I?" he murmured, and unconsciously he mimicked Hogarty's measured accents. "But I hardly believe that any sensitive scruples of mine would annoy me much in this matter. I don't know but what I'd just as soon squash a snake with a brick, even if I knew it was somebody's beloved performing pet.

"That, as you say, is your side of the question. As for me--well, every time I remember that popeyed unctuous fat party they called the 'Judge' chanting Conway's innocent childhood, with that big, lonesome kid standing there in the doorway listening and trying to understand, I begin to sizzle. It is time that Conway was licked--and licked right!

"Oh, I'm in on it--I want to be there! But," he stopped and made a painstaking effort to fit the torn card together again, "but I have an idea that Bolton may be the one to hold out. There are some honest people, you know, who are honest all the time. He might not understand the necessity of--er--a little professional fixing, so to speak."