Page:The Leather Pushers (1921).pdf/300

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force to break his neck. Same thing that killed Luther McCarthy, you know. I'll never forget Enright's expression—he was thunderstruck!"

"Thunderstruck, your great-grand-aunt!" I snorts. "He was scared stiff—he thought somebody was wise. The rat!"

"Say, what are you gettin' at?" says the Kid, interested at last.

"This," I says. "Marty McCabe wasn't killed by hittin' his bean on nothin'. He was dead when he started to fall!"

The Kid's face is a movie. "I suppose," he says, with a sarcastical smile—"I suppose that Enright had a revolver concealed in his right glove and shot him—that it?"

"No," I says, "Enright had a rabbit punch concealed in his left glove and cracked his neck!"

That removed the sarcastical smile.

"Now," I continues, watchin' the amused sparkle in this big, handsome kid's gray eyes turn to a murderous steel glint, "if you'll gimme your undivided attention, I'll tell you what come to pass in that ring to-night. In the first place, let us take the rabbit punch. You've seen 'em kill rabbits by holdin' the intelligent animal up by the ears with one hand and hittin' him sharply on the back with the edge of the other, result—one dead rabbit. Now, it ain't a million years ago since this was a perfectly legal way of endin' a box fight, but the rabbit punch has been barred by law in most places and by public opinion in all. Next we have that clinch to-night which ends with the decease of Marty McCabe. Enright, a wild swinger, throws