Page:The Leather Pushers (1921).pdf/332

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

She gazes at me closely for a second, and then she smiles. She knew she had goaled me all right—she'd probably watched 'em swoon away like that since her fifteenth birthday. Still out on my feet, I got her a chair and asked her what she wished, prepared to see that she got it if it was Niagara Falls.

"Why, I wanted to interview the champion for the 'Evening Yell,'" she tells me. "I intend doing some articles on him from a woman's viewpoint for the sporting page. I—I won't keep him long—just so I can get a few interesting facts about his rise to the top of his profession and that sort of thing, you know. You are his manager, aren't you?"

I am still in a trance, but manage to say yes.

"Perhaps you can tell me a few things while I'm waiting for him, then," she says, tryin' not to giggle, I suppose. "For instance, is it really true that he is a Yale man?"

Well, I was gettin' kind of used to this dazzlin' beauty then, and I cut loose with well-oiled and free-swingin' tongue on my favorite subject, to the viz., Kid Roberts. Whilst Joan of Newark listened with glistenin' eyes, I told her all the stuff you know about, and she seemed to be eatin' it up, only interruptin' now and then to ask a question about a date or the like and mark it down in her notebook. She seemed to think it marvelous that the Kid was due to marry into the family of a U. S. Senator and that his father had made such a wonderful comeback, and she asked me a lot about that. Well, I aimed to satisfy the girl, and I was as full of details as a income-tax blank.