'Were you going to feed lobster to this child?' she asked with ominous
calm. 'Were you intending to put him to bed full of broiled lobster and
marshmallows?'
'Nix on the rough stuff, Mamie,' pleaded the embarrassed pugilist. 'How
was I to know what kids feed on? And maybe he would have passed up the
lobster at that and stuck to the sardines.'
'Sardines!'
'Ain't kids allowed sardines?' said Steve anxiously. 'The guy at the
store told me they were wholesome and nourishing. It looked to me as if
that ought to hit young Fitzsimmons about right. What's the matter with
them?'
'A little bread-and-milk is all that he ever has before he goes to
bed.'
Steve detected a flaw in this and hastened to make his point.
'Sure,' he said, 'but he don't win the bantam-weight champeenship of
Connecticut every night.'
'Is that what he's done to-day, Steve?' asked Kirk.
'It certainly is. Ain't I telling you?'
'That's the trouble. You're not. You and Mamie seem to be having a
discussion about the nourishing properties of sardines and lobster.
What has been happening this afternoon?'
'Bad boy,' remarked William Bannister with his mouth full.
'That's right,' said Steve. 'That's it in a nutshell. Say, it was this
way. It seemed to me that, having no kid of his own age to play around
with, his nibs was apt to get lonesome, so I asked about and found that
there was a guy of the name of Whiting living near here who had a kid
of the same age or thereabouts. Maybe you remember him? He used to
fight at the feather-weight limit some time back. Called himself Young
O'Brien. He was a pretty good scrapper in his time, and now he's up
here looking after some gent's prize dogs.
'Well, I goes to him and borrows his kid. He's a scrappy sort of kid at
that and weighs ten pounds more than his nibs; but I reckoned he'd have
to do, and I thought I could stay around and part 'em if they got to
mixing it.'
Mamie uttered an indignant exclamation, but Kirk's eyes were gleaming
proudly.
'Well?' he said.
Steve swallowed lobster and resumed.
'Well, you know how it is. You meet a guy who's been in the same line
of business as yourself and you find you've got a heap to talk about.
I'd never happened across the gink Whiting, but I knew of him, and, of
course, he'd heard of me, and we got to discussing things. I seen him
lose on a foul to Tommy King in the eighteenth round out in Los
Angeles, and that kept us busy talking, him having it that he hadn't
gone within a mile of fouling Tommy and me saying I'd been in a
ring-seat and had the goods on him same as if I'd taken a snap-shot.
Well, we was both getting pretty hot under the collar about it when
suddenly there's the blazes of a noise behind us, and there's the two
kids scrapping all over the lot. The Whiting kid had started it, mind
