Loney said, “Sure you are,” and slapped me on my back. “Listen, Kid,” he said, and cleared his throat. He put his mouth over close to my ear so nobody else would hear him. “Listen, Kid, maybe—maybe you better box him like we said. O. K.?”
I said, “O.K.”
“And don't let those mugs out front yell you into anything. You're doing the fighting up there.” I said, “O. K.”
The first couple of rounds were kind of fun in a way because this was new stuff to me, this moving around him on my toes and going in and out with my hands high. Of course I had done some of that with fellows in the gym but not in the ring before and not with anybody that was as good at it as he was. He was pretty good and had it all over me both of those rounds but nobody hurt anybody else.
But in the first minute of the third he got to my jaw with a honey of a right cross and then whammed me in the body twice fast with his left. Pete and Loney had not been kidding when they said he could hit. I forgot about boxing and went in pumping with both hands, driving him all the way across the ring before he tied me up in a clinch. Everybody yelled so I guess it looked pretty good but I only really hit him once; he took the rest of them on his arms. He was the smartest fighter I had ever been up against.
By the time Pop Agnew broke us I remembered I was supposed to be boxing so I went back to that, but Perel-man was going faster and I spent most of the rest of the round trying to keep his left out of my face.
“Hurt you?” Loney asked when I was back in my corner.
“Not yet,” I said, “but he can hit.”
In the fourth I stopped another right cross with my eye and a lot of lefts with other parts of my face and the fifth round was still tougher. For one thing, the eye he had hit me in was almost shut by that time and for another thing I guess he had me pretty well figured out. He went around and around me, not letting me get set.
“How do you feel?” Loney asked when he and Dick were working on me after that round. His voice was funny, like he had a cold.
I said, “All right.” It was hard to talk much because my lips were puffed out.
“Cover up more,” Loney said.
I shook my head up and down to say I would.
“And don't pay any attention to those mugs out front.”
I had been too busy with Sailor Perelman to pay much attention to anybody else but when we came out for the sixth round I could hear people hollering things like, “Go in and fight him, Kid,” and, “Come on, Kid, go to work on this guy,” and, “What are you waiting for, Kid?” so I guessed they had been hollering like that all along. Maybe that had something to do with it or maybe I just wanted to show Loney that I was still all right so he would not worry about me. Anyway, along toward the last part of the round, when Perelman jarred me with another one of those right crosses that I was having so much trouble with, I got down low and went in after him. He hit me some but not enough to keep me away and, even if he did take care of most of my punches, I got in a couple of good ones and I could tell that he felt them. And when he tied me up in a clinch I knew he could do it because he was smarter than me and not because he was stronger.
“What's the matter with you?” he growled in my ear. “Are you gone nuts?” I never liked to talk in the ring so I just grinned to myself without saying anything and kept trying to get a hand loose.
Loney scowled at me when I sat down after that round. “What's the matter with you?” he said. “Didn't I tell you to box him?” He was awful pale and his voice was hoarse.
I said, “All right, I will.”
Dick Cohen began to curse over on the side I could not see out of. He did not seem to be cursing anybody or anything, just cursing in a low voice until Loney told him to shut up.
I wanted to ask Loney what I ought to do about that right cross but, with my mouth the way it was, talking was a lot of work and, besides, my nose was stopped up and I had to use my mouth for breathing, so I kept quiet. Loney and Dick worked harder on me than they had between any of the other rounds. When Loney crawled out of the ring just before the gong he slapped me on the shoulder and said in a sharp voice, “Now box.”
I went out and boxed. Perelman must have got to my face thirty times that round; anyway it felt like he did, but I kept on trying to box him. It seemed like a long round.
I went back to my corner not feeling exactly sick but like I might be going to get sick, and that was funny because I could not remember being hit in the stomach to amount to anything. Mostly Perelman had been working on my head. Loney looked a lot sicker than I felt. He looked so sick I tried not to look at him and I felt kind of| ashamed of making a bum out of him by letting this Perel-man make a monkey out of me like he was doing.
“Can you last it out?” Loney asked.
When I tried to answer him I found that I could not! move my lower lip because the inside of it was stuck on a broken tooth. I put a thumb up to it and Loney pushed my glove away and pulled the lip loose from the tooth.
Then I said, “Sure. I'll get the hang of it pretty soon.”
Loney made a queer gurgling kind of noise down in his throat and all of a sudden put his face up close in front of mine so that I had to stop looking at the floor and look! at him. His eyes were like you think a hophead's are. “Listen, Kid,” he says, his voice sounding cruel and hard, almost like he hated me. “To hell with this stuff. Go in and get that mug. What the hell are you boxing for? You're a fighter. Get in there and fight.”
I started to say something and then stopped, and I had a goofy idea that I would like to kiss him or something and then he was climbing through the ropes and the gong rang.
I did like Loney said and I guess I took that round by a pretty good edge. It was swell, fighting my own way again, going in banging away with both hands, not swinging or anything silly like that, just shooting them in short and hard, leaning from side to side to get everything from the ankles up into them. He hit me of course but I figured he was not likely to be able to hit me any harder than he had in the other rounds and I had stood up under that, so
I was not worrying about it now. Just before the gong rang I threw him out of a clinch and when it rang I had him covering up in a corner.
It was swell back in my corner. Everybody was yelling all around except Loney and Dick and neither of them said a single word to me. They hardly looked at me, just . at the parts they were working on and they were rougher with me than they ever were before. You would have thought I was a machine they were fixing up. Loney was not looking sick 'any more. I could tell he was excited because his face was set hard and still. I like to remember him that way, he was awful good-looking. Dick was whistling between his teeth very low while he doused my head with a sponge.
I got Perelman sooner than I expected, in the ninth. The first part of the round was his because he came out moving fast and left-handing me and making me look pretty silly, I guess, but he could not keep it up and I got in under one of his lefts and cracked him on the chin with a left hook, the first time I had been able to lay one on his head the way I wanted to. I knew it was a good one even before his head went back and I threw six punches at him as fast as I could get them out—left, right, left, right, left, right. He took care of four of them but I got him on the chin again with a right and just above his trunks with another, and when his knees bent, a little and he tried to clinch I pushed him away and smacked him on the cheek bone with everything I had.
Then Dick Cohen was putting my bathrobe over my shoulders and hugging me and sniffling and cursing and laughing all at the same time, and across the ring they were propping Perelman up on his stool.
“Where's Loney?” I asked.
Dick looked around. “I don't know. He was here. Boy, was that a mill!”
Loney caught up to us just as we were going in the dressing-room. “I had to see a fellow,” he said. His eyes were bright like he was laughing at something, but he was white as a ghost and he held his lips tight against his teeth even when he grinned kind of lopsided at me and said, “It's going to be a long time before anybody beats you, Kid.”
I said I hoped it was. I was awful tired now that it was all over. Usually I get awful hungry after a fight but this time I was just awful tired.
Loney went across to where he had hung his coat and put it on over his sweater, and when he put it on the tail of it caught and I saw he had a gun in his hip pocket. That was funny because I never knew him to carry a gun before and if he had had it in the ring everybody would have been sure to see it when he bent over working on me. I
