Steve at that time was twenty-eight years old. He had abandoned an active connection with the ring, which had begun just after his seventeenth birthday, twelve months before his entry into the Bannister home, leaving behind him a record of which any boxer might have been proud. He personally was exceedingly proud of it, and made no secret of the fact.
He was a man in private life of astonishingly even temper. The only thing that appeared to have the power to ruffle him to the slightest extent was the contemplation of what he described as the bunch of cheeses who pretended to fight nowadays. He would have considered it a privilege, it seemed, to be allowed to encounter all the middleweights in the country in one ring in a single night without training. But it appeared that he had promised his mother to quit, and he had quit.
Steve’s mother was an old lady who in her day had been the best washerwoman on Cherry Hill. She was, moreover, completely lacking in all the qualities which go to make up the patroness of sport. Steve had been injudicious enough to pay her a visit the day after his celebrated unpleasantness with that rugged warrior, Pat O’Flaherty (né Smith), and, though he had knocked Pat out midway through the second round, he bore away from the arena a black eye of such a startling richness that old Mrs. Dingle had refused to be comforted until he had promised never to enter the ring again. Which, as Steve said, had come pretty hard, he being a man who would rather be a water-bucket in a ring than a president outside it.
But he had given the promise, and kept it, leaving the field to the above-mentioned bunch of cheeses. There were times when the temptation to knock the head off Battling Dick this and Fighting Jack that became almost agony, but he never yielded to it. All of which suggests that Steve was a man of character, as indeed he was.
Bailey, entering the gymnasium, found Steve already there, punching the bag with a force and precision which showed that the bunch of cheeses ought to have been highly grateful to Mrs. Dingle for her anti-pugilistic prejudices.
“Good morning, Dingle,” said Bailey precisely.
Steve nodded. Bailey began to don his gymnasium costume. Steve gave the ball a final punch and turned to him. He was a young man who gave the impression of being, in a literal sense, perfectly square. This was due to the breadth of his shoulders, which was quite out of proportion to his height. His chest was extraordinarily deep, and his stomach and waist small, so that to the observer seeing him for the first time in boxing trunks, he seemed to begin as a big man and, halfway down, change his mind and become a small one.
His arms, which were unusually long and thick, hung down nearly to his knees and were decorated throughout with knobs and ridges of muscle that popped up and down and in and out as he moved, in a manner both fascinating and frightening. His face increased the illusion of squareness, for he had thick, straight eyebrows, a straight mouth, and a chin of almost the minimum degree of roundness. He inspected Bailey with a pair of brilliant brown eyes which no detail of his appearance could escape. And Bailey, that morning, as has been said, was not looking his best.
“You’re lookin’ kind o’ sick, bo,” was Steve’s comment. “I guess you was hittin’ it up with the gang last night in one of them lobster parlours.”
Bailey objected to being addressed as “bo,” and he was annoyed that Steve should have guessed the truth respecting his overnight movements. Still more was he annoyed that Steve’s material mind should attribute to a surfeit of lobster a pallor that was superinduced by a tortured soul.
“I did—ah—take supper last night, it is true,” he said. “But if I am a little pale today, that is not the cause. Things have occurred to annoy me intensely.”
“You should worry!” advised Steve. “Catch!”
The heavy medicine-ball struck Bailey in the chest before he could bring up his hands and sent him staggering back.
“Damn it, Dingle,” he gasped. “Kindly give me warning before you do that sort of thing.”
Steve was delighted. It amused his simple, honest soul to catch Bailey napping, and the incident gave him a text on which to hang a lecture. And, next to fighting, he loved best the sound of his own voice.
“Warning? Nix!” he said. “Ain’t it just what I been telling you every day for weeks? You gotta be ready always. You seen me holding the pellet. You should oughter have been saying to yourself: ‘I gotta keep an eye on that gink, so’s he don’t soak me one with that thing when I ain’t looking.’ Then you would have caught it and whizzed it back at me, and maybe, if I hadn’t been ready for it, you might have knocked the breeze out of me.”
“I should have derived no pleasure—”
“Why, say, suppose a plug-ugly sashays up to you on the street to take a crack at your pearl stickpin, do you reckon he’s going to drop you a postal card first? You gotta be ready for him. See what I mean?”
“Let us spar,” said Bailey austerely. He had begun to despair of ever making Steve show him that deference and respect which he considered due to the son of the house. The more frigid he was, the more genial and friendly did Steve become. The thing seemed hopeless.
It was a pleasing sight to see Bailey spar. He brought to the task the measured dignity which characterized all his
