“Bad boy,” he said, and looked meaningly again at the candy.
“What does he mean by ‘bad boy’?”
“Just what he says, Mamie, honest. Gee! you don’t think I done it, do you?”
“Have you been letting the precious lamb fight?” cried Mamie, her eyes two circles of blue indignation.
Steve’s enthusiasm overcame his sense of guilt. He uttered a whoop.
“Letting him! Gee! Listen to her! Why, say, that kid don’t have to be let! He’s a scrapper from Swatville-on-the-Bingle. Honest! That’s what all this food is about. We’re celebrating. This is a little supper given in his honour by a few of his admirers and backers, meaning me. Why, say, Kirk, that kid of yours is just the greatest thing that ever happened. Get that chafing-dish going and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“How did he come by that scratch?” said Mamie, coldly sticking to her point.
“I’ll tell you quick enough. But let’s start in on the eats first. You wouldn’t keep a coming champ waiting for his grub, would you? Look how he’s lamping that candy.”
“Were you going to let the poor mite stuff himself with candy, Steve Dingle?”
“Sure. Whatever he says goes. He owns the joint after this afternoon.”
Mamie swiftly removed the unwholesome delicacy.
“The idea!”
Kirk was busying himself with the chafing-dish.
“What have you got in here, Steve?”
“Lobster, colonel. I had to do thirty miles to get it, too.”
Mamie looked at him fixedly.
“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 bantamweight champeenship of Connecticut every night.”
“Is that what he’s done today, 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 featherweight 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 snapshot. 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 you, and him ten pounds heavier than Bill, and tough, too.”
The White Hope confirmed this.
“Bad boy,” he remarked, and with a deep breath resumed excavating work on a grapefruit.
“Well, I was just making a jump to separate them when this Whiting gook says, ‘Betcha a dollar my kid wins!’ and before I knew what I was doing I’d taken him. It wasn’t that that stopped me, though. It was his saying that his kid took after his dad and could eat up anything of his own age in America. Well, darn it, could I take that from a slob of a mixed-ale scrapper when it was handed out at the finest kid that ever came from New York?”
“Of course not,” said Kirk indignantly, and even Mamie forbore to criticize. She bent over the White Hope and gave his grapefruit-stained cheek a kiss.
“Well, I should say not!” cried Steve. “I just hollered to his nibs, ‘Soak it to him, kid! for the honour of No. 99’; and, believe me, the young bearcat sort of gathered himself together, winked at me, and began to hammer the stuffing out of the scrappy kid. Say, there wasn’t no sterilized stuff about his work. You were a regular germ, all right, weren’t you squire?”
“Germ,” agreed the White Hope. He spoke drowsily.
“Gee!” Steve resumed his saga in a whirl of enthusiasm. “Gee! if they’re right to start with, if they’re born right, if they’ve got
