Page:The Leather Pushers (1921).pdf/238

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

champ would make Kenney ripe to wade through the third-rate heavies as sensationally as the Kid did.

I put it up to Roberts, and he was enthusiastic.

"Bring him along, by all means," he nods. "He's a good, game fellow and may develop into a first-class heavyweight. At all events, he'll make a splendid sparring partner, for, in spite of his greenness, he's tough and dangerous enough to keep me on my toes for a few minutes at least. I admire the way he stood up to me, and I'll take a great deal of interest in teaching him what I can."

He takes out his wallet and removes a hundred-case note. "Here," he adds, "that big fellow's poor showing against a smaller man last night must have been rather humiliating. I know how miserable I felt the first time! Give him this—it'll cheer him up a bit. From the desperate way he tried to put me out, the poor devil probably needs it, unless I'm very much mistaken."

He was very much mistaken! I ambled into a general store where they sold everything from potatoes to pianos, and learned that Joseph Kenney could be found on a cattle mine about two miles out of the metropolis. The merchant prince which owns the store heartily recommends his son as a scout, and a long, lean, lank dumb-bell garbed like Wm. S. Hart, minus the artillery, quits killin' flies with the lash of a quirt and nods for me to follow him out.

I was just goin' to inform him that ridin' horses was one of the two or three things I ain't fluent at, when he leads me over to a ancient, dilapidated flivver, and motions me to enter therein.