Winner Take All

But what about Gay? That was the natural question and they asked it. Blair had disposed of him, also in the first round.

But to that Devereau made no answer, no verbal answer, at least. He did not point out that Hughie was a set-up, a second-rater. No, indeed. He shrugged his shoulders—shrugged them almost audibly.

"I had nothing to do with it," he said. "Absolutely. Ask Blair about it. I've quit him."

Pig-iron Dunham, who paid the bills, and Devereau who was cunning, did just what the latter had promised they would do. In a few short months they put Perry Blair, light-weight champion of the world, out on the sidewalk.

It can't be done? It is done every day, in politics. It needs only a practiced hand.

For a day or two following Devereau's unsatisfactory laconism nothing developed. And then a bombshell exploded. Hughie Gay made a statement. He took oath, solemn oath (and cheap, too, for it cost Dunham but two hundred dollars), that he had sold out. Blair had realized that he was no champion; he had feared even him, Gay. So before the fight Blair had paid him well to throw it. And he had done so.

Thus, you see, they learned logically why Devereau had quit Perry. Devereau was square. Sure! This proved it. You said it! They understood perfectly those eloquent shoulder shrugs now. And they raised a righteous clamor. Perry Blair denied the charge, and offered to meet Gay again, anywhere, for any charity. And they replied, with equal logic, that every reputable club in the country should bar him thenceforth.

In a short interview, not as unsatisfactory as Devereau's, Pig-iron Dunham broke a rule and talked for publication.

"It is the sort of thing which has given a bad name to a clean and manly sport in this state," he said. "I sincerely trust, however, that all true lovers of the squared circle will put the blame where it belongs."

And in the meantime his paid mouthpieces parroted everywhere the words in which they had been drilled. He has no punch at all, they said; he can't hit. He has no science, they said; he is slow as a freight. He has not the fighter's heart. He's yellow—yellow! And that word stuck.

The clique which had rated his reticence stingy was eager to believe. They needed no persuading. So no throngs gathered round him any more. Those who had fawned passed by on the far side of the street, lest crudely he recall past accommodations. And, passing, they smiled. And the public, that public to which a world's champion was something picturesque at which to crane the neck, if they recognized him at all now, had to concentrate to remember what it was that they had read lately about him. Crooked? That was bad. Not clever enough to get away with it? That was worse. Yellow? Well, that was unpardonable in any man. And they hardly hid their contempt.

After a few fruitless attempts Perry gave up trying to find a new manager and sought bouts for himself. He found them, but on such terms that they were always impossible. He challenged Jimmy Montague, which was a bad tactical error, but he had been just a little panicky at first. He challenged Montague who was being hailed as the logical title-holder, and in so doing seemed tacitly to admit that he realized the claim was good.

Montague ignored him.

He challenged Holliday, and he was afraid of Holliday, too. And Holliday made game of him noisily.

"What'll it get me to fight you?" he wanted to know. "If I stub me toe and fall down, somebody'll raise a yelp that you bought me off. Not me! Us girls has got to be careful. Besides, I'm looking for a battle with the real champ."

It can't be done? Oh, they did it.

The night that Cecille Manners had hysterics and Felicity was hurrying because she knew that Fiegenspann would "bawl her out" if she was very late, Perry Blair had been standing from eleven o'clock until a quarter to twelve on the corner of Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, too proud to turn the collar of his light coat up against the winter cold, too broke to buy a heavy one. He'd almost decided to hunt a job, anything that would bring enough to take him back home. The Dream? Girl o' Mine? It hurt his throat to think of these,—made him blink his eyes.

So they had undermined him.

He was standing on a corner wondering what it was all about. But in that last three-quarters of an hour he had achieved something at least, a terse sentence that must, it seems, epitomize the sentiments of every idol who ever shared his predicament, every king who ever lacked a throne.

He nodded his head over it, and voiced it pensively.

"It's a great world," he muttered, "if you don't weaken."

Then he saw that she would very likely be killed if someone didn't do something about it besides shout. He weighed the chances, in an infinitesimal fraction of a second, and decided they were such that any good gambler could scarcely ignore. So he bunched his muscles and sprang.

Felicity's taxi had met a traffic tie-up at Forty-seventh Street which made further direct advance impossible. In obedience to her plain request for haste the driver had tried it to the west, found that way cut off, and so detoured to the east. When, however, he wriggled up to Broadway on Forty-fourth Street he had met with no better luck.

Here was a din of horns, of racing motors, of harried traffic police. But not much chance of progress. So Felicity paid him and stepped off the running-board into the thick of it to have a try on foot at the very moment when the nearest officer thought to have it cleared.

He raised an arm and roared, bull-voiced:

"Come on there, now!"

And promptly the drivers of the two cars which had been at the heart of the snarl, like key logs in a jam, both heckled, both in the wrong and filled with unsaid things, trod harshly upon their accelerators. Wire-wheeled sedan and lemon-tinted limousine, up-town bound and cross-town bound, they leaped simultaneously forward, as Felicity stepped between.

Bystanders screamed so efficiently that their shrill tumult drowned the wail of overtaxed brakedrums. But that would have helped Felicity little. Nor could the brakes, for that matter. The lunging start had been too strong, the space too short to stop in.

Perry Blair, about whom those who screamed had heard something unpleasant—oh, yes, yellow!—lanced down the narrowing aisle between radiator and fenders. He struck Felicity like a vicious tackler yet did not go down, but leaped again. As the cars crunched together they slithered through the crowd, across the walk, against a wall, into a heap. And the fall hurt Perry a little, even accustomed as he was to the taking of blows yieldingly. He was slow to rise. The girl was quickly up.

"Last down!" she gasped, but her exclamation was somewhat pallid like her wit. "Hold 'em, Yale!"

Then, while she still faltered, uncertain, shaken, the occupant of the lemon-tinted limousine came swiftly to her. He was a great hulk of a man, yet light on his feet with that nimbleness which seems often astonishing in huge people.

"Let me put you in my car, Miss Brown," he begged, "and set you safely across. Not badly bruised, I trust?"

She gave him a flash of a glance and gasped again, but this time inaudibly. His ease with her name did not surprise her. He'd seen her often enough to know that. But this, she realized, was the first time that she had really been impressed upon him. Not too steadily, therefore, that she might need assistance, she let him help her back across the sidewalk, to the car, and thus away. Pig-iron Dunham? Of course. Knowing Felicity there is small cause to wonder that she went without even remembering to thank her rescuer.

He was getting up now, the target of few eyes. Most of those who lingered at all were staring after Dunham, Felicity and the lemon limousine. And Perry was congratulating himself, even while with an odd, detached expression he watched them go, that he had damaged but little his clothing, when a hand fell on his sleeve.

Perry turned to find a reporter, Hamilton by name, peering at him quizzically.

"Forgot to thank you, did she?" he laughed. "Oh, well, better come along over to the Roof with me and watch her caper, and give her another chance."

Perry didn't know whether he liked Hamilton or not, but he didn't instinctively distrust him.

"Who is she?" he asked.

"You really don't know?"

"I don't know many girls in this town."

"Hm-m-m," said Hamilton. "Thought everybody knew her. Felicity Brown. Aero Octet." And he repeated his invitation.

"She'll want to thank you for preventing damage to life or limb." He couldn't have said exactly what made him voice the rest, unless it was the way the boy's eyes had followed her.

"And believe me, damage to life or limb, it would have been an equal catastrophe to Felicity. Come on along."

Perry hung back.

"Don't you know," he hesitated, "that you can lose your reputation just from being seen talking to me?"

Hamilton laughed again. He saw, however, that Perry's mind was not upon what he was saying. And who shall say when fancy first was bred? Not you—or I—or even Hamilton. But the latter might have hazarded a shrewd guess. And a man, it would seem, has a little excuse for falling in love with a girl with Felicity's looks, whose life he just has saved.

"Come along," urged Hamilton. "I want to hear about that mess. I've been six months in Mexico." But he eyed the boy with deeper curiosity as they crossed Broadway.

"Who was the man?"

Perry spoke just once to ask that question, before they left the white-lit street for the elevator.

"Dunham."

Yet somehow Hamilton was sure that the other had known all along. And the quizzical eyes became malicious. If the boy was falling in love with Felicity he anticipated with glee unholy complications. Dunham's alacrity at the scene of the accident no man could underestimate. Pig-iron Dunham didn't, indiscriminately, beg young ladies to let the limousine bear them across Broadway in safety, or anywhere else, for that matter.

And yet, some hours later, when he had left Perry Blair waiting for Felicity at the mouth of the alley which ran back to the Roof's stage door, Hamilton found himself with little relish for the complications which he had so wisely foreseen. Perry's story of the trouble with Devereau and Dunham he had had in full, and believed. He had wanted to do something and realized that there was not much which he could do.

And now this. It was funny—but it wasn't so damned funny either. Why, the kid was just—well, just a kid. And Felicity had been sweet to him. Very sweet and simple, in spite of his own none too well curbed sarcasm. Under Dunham's eye—because she knew that Dunham's eye was always upon her—she had sat long at their table, a slim thing in new-grass green, so prettily grateful that she suggested pink sashes and dimity. And Felicity wasn't a pink-sash-and-dimity girl. Hamilton knew that. But did Perry Blair? Just a kid! Dammitt! But nobody, not even a kid, had any right monkeying with Broadway, or Felicity, if he couldn't take care of himself.

Yet Hamilton, after he had said good-night, lingered a while. And again—immediately—something which he had anticipated came to pass.

The lemon limousine was waiting at the curb. And Dunham stepped out of it, again with his preposterous nimbleness, when Felicity appeared. He stood holding wide the door. But the girl gave him only a nice little nod. She slipped her hand happily into the crook of Perry's arm.

Hamilton had a glimpse of Pig-iron Dunham's face.

"Hooked!" he exclaimed. "Hooked!"

But he had a good look at Perry Blair's too, as the pair passed.

"Dammitt!" he snapped. "Dammitt!" And yet folks wondered why a chap who knocked around this city hunting news sometimes drank more than was good for him.

CHAPTER VII

AS WILLOWS BUD IN SPRING

Cecille was still up, staring out of the window, when Felicity and Perry Blair came in that night. Perry stayed but a moment, only long enough to promise that he would come again. Then he was gone. And Felicity was standing before the other girl, every line of her pulsing triumph.

"Not him!" Cecille cried. She could not have understood the triumph better had Felicity explained with a torrent of words.

"Oh, not him!" with quick, unthinking horror. "He—he's only a boy."

"Who?" demanded Felicity blankly.

"Mr—Mr. Blair."

Felicity's laugh was staccato.

"Him? Good Lord, no. Dunham!" She fairly sang it. "Dunham. Pig-iron Dunham. I knew if I waited I'd cop. Now watch me. Watch my dust!"

Cecille wondered why she didn't pack her bag and get out. But she didn't. She stayed. And later, a little timidly, she inquired about Blair.

"Perry Blair?" Felicity with a racing tongue had been describing how Dunham led her away from the near-accident.

"Perry? Oh, he's a prize-fighter. Light-weight champion, or he was for a minute or so. He wouldn't play the game when he had his chance, I guess, so Dunham and the bunch broke him. Something like that. I never did hear the inside stuff. But they say he was a bust anyway—just a morning-glory—and didn't know his luck. But do I? Did I play the game to-night? Did I pass up Pig-iron and his limousine to come home in a flat-wheeled trolley with my hero, who's already made him sore once? Oh, didn't I though! I guess I'm crazy!"

Cecille recoiled a little from that.

A prize-fighter. A bruiser. A plug-ugly. But—but—why, that wasn't possible. And if your idea of such a one is what Cecille's once was, neither will he fill your eye.

Just a kid. Hamilton had hit it off aptly at that. Level-eyed and diffident of tongue, with only a hint of his hidden bodily perfection lurking in breadth of shoulder and slenderness of waist.

A prize-fighter! Cecille fell asleep wondering how soon he would come again. As to whether he would come at all she was never for a moment in doubt. Once she had watched his eyes follow Felicity across the room she knew. But she hadn't felt sorry for him as Hamilton had. She felt sorry for herself and bitter against Perry. For the time she hated him.

Nor did she have to wonder long. Perry came the next night and escorted Felicity to the Roof. And the next. And next. Then Felicity realized that it would not be good policy to make Dunham sulk. Indeed she knew her luck. Indeed she played the game. The third evening she left Perry at home with Cecille.

And for six whole weeks Broadway nudged and watched it. Broadway watched Perry Blair's courtship of Felicity and Dunham's, if you can call the latter's unhurried pursuit that. Dunham was complacent and patient, Felicity's tactics were not new to him and he did not mind being made conspicuous. And Perry Blair never knew they nudged; never knew they laughed. There is some satisfaction in that. But it is far finer, I think, to be sure that Broadway never guessed at all of the other courtship which went steadily forward in the same interval, elementally, naturally as willows bud in spring. Perry himself was unaware of it. Cecille too—for a while.

For Felicity left him oftener and oftener to the other girl. And almost immediately a common need for the companionship of the other was born in both of them. Upon the boy's part it must have been the urge to carry on his courtship, even vicariously. Lonesomeness was the way Cecille explained it to herself until with the passage of a little time she could no longer tell herself that lie and believe it. And that marked the beginning of a long bad period for her.

She ceased soon to hate him when he spoke of Felicity. Whenever he observed haltingly, as he did over and over again, that it was no place for a girl like her (Fiegenspann's) and that she should be gotten out before it was too late, she learned to agree with him mechanically. Instead of hating his blindness, as persistently as she dared she swung the conversation more and more to other things.

From the beginning she found it hard to make him talk about himself. That instantly set him apart from all other men in her experience. For they had talked of little else. And yet, when finally she had it from him, she found his ambition anything but vague.

"I like animals," he told her on one such occasion, "and the—the country. I guess that's what I am, a country boy. I sure would like to own a ranch."

He'd not pressed her so eagerly for her hopes. Scarcely. His singleness of interest at least was wholly masculine. But that didn't deter her. She found herself giving them to him just the same, just as eagerly.

"A ranch!" she seized hungrily upon that word. "A home! A white house on a hill with light green shutters. The house, of course, not the hill." She went further.

"And a white and blue kitchen." Her haste to tell him was bubbling. "With aluminum pots and pans. Dozens! A whole set!"

And, somehow subdued:

"They're very expensive."

Broadway never knew anything about that courtship. But Felicity used to wake up, now and then, and hear the other girl crying softly in the night.

It was a long bad period for Cecille. At first the birth of this wholly new thing within her baffled her own power to reason. She watched its mushroom growth with fascination, just a little aghast. But when, all in a kind of cataclysmic flash, she thought to recognize it for what it was, she shrank away as if from a malignant fungus.

From the first evening one thing had intrigued her. Her discovery that the sensation of pervading cleanliness which she always had from him was not a result of the careful clothes he wore but something more essential made her remember how the Sunday-groomed louts of other days, reeking with cheap toilet water and hair oil, had filled her with dull loathing. She had never attempted an analysis of that distaste. Now trying to analyze its opposite, in the case of Perry Blair, she arrived at a disquieting certainty. She found she could no more be near him, no more glance at him, without being conscious of him physically, than she could strike her head against a wall and not be hurt.

She realized more. She realized how keenly she liked being near him. She realized how often, and for how long, she had been making little opportunities to stand close, so that her shoulder brushed his. How often she had contrived a fleeting contact of their hands. And yet if anybody had tried to tell her that this was the blooming of a perfect thing to be cherished all her days she would have suffered unutterably that she had been found out. As it was she suffered sufficiently. She cried too often into her pillow. But she wasn't yet wholly debased in her own eyes. That came directly, inevitably.

One Saturday afternoon, urged more enthusiastically by him than she had ever been urged before, she accompanied him to a gymnasium far uptown.

"I'm keeping in shape, you see," he told her without his usual diffidence. "I don't know quite why. Everybody says I'm through, but sometimes I think something may turn up. Enough to bring me a little stake anyhow. And, anyway, it pays me a little. I'm working out with Jack English. He's a welter; he's getting ready for a go with Levitt. I've told you a lot about this business, but you can't judge much just from talk. I—I'd like to have you come up and watch me box."

There it was, of a sudden. There was his shyness again, so lamely come upon him that it colored his face. And the halting boyishness of the request had warmed Cecille's face too; warmed her through and through. She knew an impulse to hug his head to her breast, a very mature and motherly impulse.

He had told her much of this business; so much that she hardly recoiled from it at all. A welter—yes, she understood that. Between a light-weight and a middle.

But she hesitated so long that he thought he had guessed her objection and hastened to reassure her.

"There won't be anybody there," he said. "Nobody. Just English and his trainer and me. You needn't be afraid—"

"I'm not," she stopped him. "It's not—that."

So she went.

CHAPTER VIII

MY LAD

She found herself an hour later in a huge light room, with a floor like a dance hall and much strange paraphernalia against the walls. Little of it she was able to identify, though she took it all in with alert and eager eyes. This was the chiefest part of his life, so she must not even seem to slight it. The Indian clubs and dumb-bells—but they were easy. And the roped-off square at one end. That was the ring.

She found herself alone for a while, and was thrilled and excited and very happy. And then a quiet man who was, she guessed correctly, English's trainer came briskly toward her.

"You needn't be afraid." So Perry had assured her.

Surely not if this man's bearing was any criterion. He brought her a chair.

"Thank you." Her voice sounded small in that high-ceiled room. He only bowed in reply and went quietly away.

And then the next time she looked up it was to find Perry standing there beside her—a different Perry—a pagan Perry, stripped of all save trunks and shoes, yet unconscious of his nakedness.

"I'm not afraid," she'd told him. "It's not that."

Now she knew why she had hesitated about coming. And she was sorry, and breathlessly glad.

A pagan Perry, and one more beautiful than she otherwise could ever have dreamed. And yet, after the first startled glance, while she still dropped her head and put palms to her cheeks to hide a furious color, his lack of self-consciousness dismayed her, until it occurred to her that these were his working clothes—casual, ordinary. And with that a queer thought, seemingly unrelated, flashed through her head. She remembered that women almost never went to prize-fights—it was a man's sport—and she was jealously glad over that.

It shamed her. But she looked again. And again. And sudden rebellion at that shame led her to a wholly spontaneous, wholly unconsidered act. Perry was deep in abstraction. She knew what he was brooding over. That made her rebellious, too. Suddenly she reached out and laid her hand upon his bare shoulder.

He looked around and smiled.

"Hard?" He believed he understood the expression he had surprised in her eyes.

"I'm in pretty good shape. I'm pretty hard."

She made only a muffled attempt at reply. She found it, without speaking, hard enough to breathe.

Hard? Yes. Unexpectedly undeniable, like a billiard ball. Nor could she very well stammer that it was the smoothness of his skin which had stunned her. She dropped her head again. She could not have kept it up after that and kept her eyelids open.

When she finally lifted it Perry was already in the ring and English vaulting the ropes. English was as unclothed as the other, yet she found immediately that she could look at him without any disturbing mixture of ecstasy and guilt. And even critically, too. He was thick, bulky. He did not make one catch one's breath. And brown. And Perry's whiteness! She took her lower lip between her teeth.

"Time!" the trainer called.

She cried sharply aloud.

The sound came unsummoned, in spite of herself.

Why, they had just been standing there together—just talking—just laughing—just boys! But with that signal they had exploded into action. No other word could hope to convey that sudden burst of motion.

They touched gloves! She followed that. English tried to hit him! She followed that. And then thud! thud! thud! She could not beat as swiftly with one fist the palm of her other hand as Perry's glove struck thrice the welter's face.

Thud! thud! thud! And skip and shuffle—thud! And a straining, desperate embrace.

"Oh, he's so much bigger," she heard herself wailing. "He's so much bigger!"

And the trainer, remembering through it all her presence:

"Watch it! Watch it! Watch—that—left—hand!"

She saw then that it was Perry's short, jabbing, stiff left forearm which perplexed the heavier man. She saw the latter set himself to swing, and take it in the face, and go off balance. And set and take it again. And she didn't cry out any more. She leaned forward, so tensely set herself in every muscle that she found she was tired when the trainer stopped it.

"Time!"

The trainer she learned then was not pleased. He snarled at Jack English. But English only grinned.

"Slow!" he said. "Slow! Oh, boy! So'd you look slow trying to pace the Empire State Express."

And there was more. Faster, faster and faster. And cruder! He could never tell her again that this was merely sport. And English was bigger and his size did count. At the last he seemed barely to snap his right gloved hand forward, and Perry staggered back.