“Let me handle you, Burkey,” he says. “I’ll get you on in Milwaukee and I’ll take you down east and make you some money. If you’re handled right, they’s no reason why you shouldn’t be welterweight champion some day.”
“I don’t want to be welterweight champion,” said Burke. “I just want to be champion of Charley Porter. And when I’ve beat him, I’m through.”
“All right,” says Howard. “You know what you want. But let me tell you one thing—you won’t beat Porter or no one else if you just pet them. You’ve got to hit!”
The kid smiled.
“I’ll hit when it’s time,” he says.
So that was the last Howard heard of him till pretty near a month later, when he picked up a paper and read where Young Burke, a farmer boy living outside of Benton Harbor, had stopped Charley Porter, an aspirant for the welterweight title, in one round.
III
About a month more went by before Burke showed up in Chi again and called on Nate. As soon as he mentioned his name and where he was from, Nate was interested. Because Howard had told him about his experience with the kid. But Burkey wasn’t made up no more like Howard had described him. He was wearing the best suit of clothes twenty dollars could buy.
“I went to see Howard,” he says, “but he’s out of town. So I come to you. I want to go in the fight game.”
“I understood from Howard,” says Nate, “that you was going to quit after that one bout.”
“I thought I was,” says Burkey. “But it’s different now. You see, I and my old man has busted up. So I got to make a living.”
“What was the bust-up over?” ast Nate. “Didn’t he like you boxing?”
“He didn’t care nothing about that,” says the kid. “But they was a gal he wanted I should marry. And I give her the air. So he done the same to me.”
“Why did you quit the gal?” ast Nate.
“I figured I could do better,” he says. “She’s just a gal round home there, and why should I marry her? I can pretty near pick who I want to marry.”
“Everybody can pick who they want to marry,” said Nate.
“Yes, but who I pick, I can pretty near have,” says the kid. “I thought I was stuck on this gal, but I found I wasn’t. I hadn’t seen hardly any other gals, and she was always round. So I thought she was about the only gal in the world. I know better now. But I did like her and my old man liked her and kept after me to ask her. So I ast her and she told me she was stuck on somebody else. So I ast her who was it and she said Charley Porter. She didn’t know him, but she’d seen him on the street a lot of times, and he’d smiled at her. She thought he was handsome and made a hero out of him. He was the best fighter in the world, to her mind. So I said I could beat him and she laughed at me. She says, ‘You might beat him plowing.’ So I said, ‘I can beat him boxing.’ So she says, ‘All right. You do it and I’ll like you better than him.’ So I come up here and took a few lessons and knocked him cockeyed.
“When she seen me afterwards, she throwed her arms round my neck and said I was the best man in the world, and we got engaged. But during the time I was up here in Chi learning to box, I learnt to dance too. And I bought me these good clothes. So after I trimmed Porter I got to going over to St. Joe, to the pavilion, nights, and I seen all the gals was nuts over me. So I said to myself, ‘What’s the idear of tying up to this rube gal when you can marry somebody that is somebody—maybe one of these rich Chicago society dames.’ So I give this hick the air and my old man throwed me out of the house.”
Well, Nate’s handled a lot of boxers and never seen one yet that despised himself, but after he’d listened to this bird a w’ile, he begin to think that all the rest of them was lilies of the valley.
“Which Chicago society gal have you picked out?” he says, to lead him on.
“I don’t know yet,” says Burkey. “Some of them at the dances in St. Joe looked good, but I want to see them all before I tie myself up.”
If you ever been to St. Joe, you know the Chicago society gals that attends them dances. If you want to see one of them in the middle of the week, go up to the Draperies and ask for Min.
“You got the right dope,” Nate says. “You’d be a sucker to make a choice till you’d looked over the whole field. And in the meanw’ile, I’ll try and get you fixed up with a couple of matches so as you can grab some spending money.”
But Burke was still thinking of the dames.
“I read a great story the other day,” he says. “It was a young fella that was a boxer and one night he was walking along the street and he heard a gal scream. She was up on the porch of a big house and they was a dude there, trying to make love to her. So she didn’t like him and that’s why she screamed. So this young fella went in and grabbed the dude and knocked him for a long trip. So the gal got stuck on this young fella, the boxer, and married him and she turned out to be a millionaire.”
“A great story!” said Nate. “I certainly wished I could of read it.
