Page:The Leather Pushers (1921).pdf/160

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

it was a corker. Halliday, your right hook to the jaw is the fastest thing I've ever seen inside of a glove and I haven't missed a championship bout in the last twenty-five years!"

"You're a boxing enthusiast, then?" inquires the Kid with the greatest of relief, whilst a wanderin' eye fixes itself on the girl which had been with the old boy.

"Indeed, I am!" says our elderly tête-à-tête, with a touch of gusto. "Much to the annoyance of Dolores—my daughter—whose feminine curiosity led her to witness one prize fight with me and who, I am sure, will never see another! Not understanding the—eh—fine points of the game, she thought it merely a brutal and disgusting exhibition—to quote her verbatim. I've been boxing with an instructor at my club in Washington for nearly a year, and I feel like a boy of twenty. I don't know what a doctor looks like, and I'm eating and sleeping like a Hoosier farm hand! If you intend doing any training to keep in condition on the trip across, Halliday, I'd be delighted to come down to the very excellent gymnasium they have on the lower deck and—ah—limber up a bit with you."

The Kid smiles down at this good old sport, which, for all his white hair and wrinkled face, looked the photograph of health and likewise able to give a good account of himself, fisticuffally speakin' should the occasion ever come up.

"I shall be pleased to have you, senator," says Kid Roberts, and then, realizin' that him and the sen is far from alone, he introduces me with not a little