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Once to Every Man

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Год написания книги
2017
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“There’s no need, mind, of being careless,” he cautioned. “He–he might have a punch, you know, at that. Some of ’em do–a lucky one once in a while. Just watch him a trifle–and hand it to him good!”

Sutton nodded and rose to his feet. Watch in hand, Hogarty vaulted the ropes, and Ogden, with a last whispered admonition, bundled up the bathrobe and scuttled from the ring.

At that moment Young Denny’s bulkily slender body was even more deceptive. Sutton, even when trained to his finest, would have outweighed him twenty pounds. Now that margin was nearer thirty, and added to that, he was inches less in height. He was shorter of neck, blocky, built close to the ground. And the span of his ankle was nearly as great as that of Denny’s knee.

Comparing them with detail-hungry eyes, Bobby Ogden saw, however, that from the waist up the boy’s clean, swelling body totally shadowed the other’s knotted bulk; he noted that, with arm outstretched, heel of glove against Sutton’s chin, Denny’s reach was more than great enough to hold the other away from him. Hard on the heels of that thought came the realization that that was a fine point of the game utterly outside of the boy’s knowledge.

It was quiet–oddly, peacefully quiet for a second–in that long room. Then in obedience to a nod from Hogarty the lanky boy called Legs languidly touched a bell, and all that peaceful silence was shattered to bits. Ogden shouted aloud, without knowing it, a shrill, dismayed cry of warning, as Sutton catapulted from his corner; he shouted and shut his eyes and winced as if that rushing attack had been launched at himself. But he opened them again–opened them at the sound of a sickening smash of glove against flesh–to see Denny blink both eyes as his whole body rebounded from that blow.

Ogden waited, forgetting to breathe, for the boy to go down; he waited to see his knees weaken and his shoulders slump forward. But instead of shriveling before that pile-driver swing, he realized that Denny somehow was weathering the storm of blows that followed it; that somehow he had managed to keep his feet and was backing away, trying to follow faithfully his instructions.

Just as Ogden had pictured it would be, it all happened. Foot by foot Sutton drove him around the ring. There was no opening for Denny to return a blow–nothing but a maze of battering fists to be blocked and ducked and covered. Even the speed, the natural speed of lithe muscles for which Bobby had hoped, and hopelessly expected, was entirely lacking in every motion. Heavy-footed, ponderous, Young Denny gave way before that attack. Sutton, always reputed slow, was terribly, brutally swift of movement in comparison with the boy’s faltering uncertainty.

Twice and a third time in the first minute of fighting Boots feinted aside his guard with what seemed childish ease and then drove his glove against the other’s unprotected face. Time after time he repeated the blow, and at each sickening smack that answered the crash of leather against flesh Bobby Ogden gasped aloud and marveled. For at each jolt Denny merely blinked his eyes as he recoiled–blinked, and retreated a little more slowly than before.

At the bell Ogden was through the ropes and dragging him to his corner. A little trickle of blood was gathering on the point of Denny’s chin where the glove had opened afresh the half-healed cut on his cheek; he was shaking his head as he waved aside the wet towel in Ogden’s hands.

“Man, but you’re some bear for punishment!” Ogden chattered, strangely weak himself beneath his belt. “If you only had a little speed–just a little! Why, he sent over a dozen to your chin that ought to have laid you away. But you’re playing him right! You’re working him, and if you can manage to hang on you’ll get him in the end. Just keep away–keep away and let him wear himself out. But–oh, if you did have it. Just one real punch!”

Young Denny continued to shake his head–continued to shake it doggedly.

“Do–do you mean that that is as hard as he is likely to hit?” he queried slowly. “Do you mean–he was really trying–hard?”

Ogden stopped urging the wet towel upon him and stood and gazed at him with something close akin to awe in his eyes.

“Hard!” he echoed in a small voice. “Hard! How hard do you expect a man to hit?”

“Then your plan was wrong,” Young Denny told him. “Of course,” he hastened to soften that abrupt statement, “of course it would work all right, only–only I’m not much good at that kind of fancy work. I–I just have to wade right in, when I want to do any damage, because I’m slow getting away from a man. I can’t punch–not hard–when I’m backing off. But now I aim to show you how hard I expect a man to hit, just as soon as they ring that bell!”

Hogarty was leaning over Sutton in the opposite corner, frowning and talking rapidly.

“What’s the matter, Boots?” he demanded anxiously. “Haven’t lost your kick, have you?”

Sutton gazed contemplatively down at his gloved hands and up again into his employer’s face.

“Who’d you say that guy was?” he countered. “Where’s he blowed in from–again?”

“A rube–down from the hills he called it. Just some come-on,” Hogarty repeated his former information, “who thinks because he’s cleaned up main street and licked the village blacksmith that he’s a world-beater. Why, Boots? You aren’t worried, are you?”

The contemplative gleam in Sutton’s eyes deepened.

“Because,” he stated thoughtfully, “just because there’s some mistake–or–or he’s made of brass. I–I hit him pretty hard, Flash–and do you know what he done? Well, he blinked. He–blinked–at–me. I never hit any man harder.”

Hogarty’s face had lost a little of its inscrutability. He flashed one sharp glance across at Young Denny in the other corner as he stepped back out of the ring and his frown deepened a little after that brief scrutiny. For the boy’s body, squatting there, crouched waiting for the bell, was taut in every sinew, quivering with eagerness.

“You just failed to place ’em right, I guess,” he reassured Boots. “Take a little more time, and get him flush on the bone. You can slow up a little. He isn’t even fast enough to run away from you.”

Again Hogarty nodded to the boy called Legs, and again the gong rang. Five minutes earlier it would have been hard for Bobby Ogden to have explained just what it was which he had half dreamed might lurk in those rippling muscles that bunched and ran beneath Denny’s white skin. For want of a better name he had named it speed. And now, at the tap of the bell, he watched and recognized.

Swift as was Sutton’s savage rush across the canvas, he had hardly left his corner in the ropes before Young Denny was upon him. The boy lifted and sprang and dropped cat-footed in the middle of the ring, hunched of shoulder and bent of knee to meet the shocking impact. It was bewilderingly rapid–terrifyingly effortless–this explosive, spontaneous answer of every muscle to the call of the brain. Just as before, Sutton feinted and saw his opening and swung. Young Denny knew only one best way to fight; he knew only that he had to take a blow in order to give one, and Sutton’s fist shot home against his unprotected chin. He blinked with the shock, just as he had blinked before, and swayed back a little. Sutton had swung hard–he had swung from his heels–and he was still following that blow through when Denny snapped forward again.

It wasn’t a long swing, but it was wickedly quick. From the waist it started, a short, vicious jolt that carried all the boy’s weight behind it, and the instant that Denny whipped it over Sutton’s chin seemed to come out to meet it–seemed almost to lift to receive it. And then, as his head leaped back, even before his body had lifted from the floor, the boy’s other hand drove across and set him spinning in the air as he fell. He went down sideways, a long, crashing fall that dropped him limp in the corner which he had just left.

For a moment Denny crouched waiting for him to rise. Then he realized that Sutton would not rise again–not for a time. He saw Hogarty leap over the ropes and kneel–saw the boy Legs rush across with ammonia and water–and he understood. Ogden was at his side, pounding him upon the shoulder and shrieking in his ear. His eyes lifted from the face of the fallen man to that of the heliotrope silk-shirted person beside him.

“He’s not really badly hurt, is he?” he inquired slowly. “I–I didn’t hit him–too hard?”

Ogden ceased for a moment thumping him on the back.

“Hurt!” he yelped. “Didn’t hit him too hard! Why, man, he’s stiff, right now. He’s ready for the coroner! Gad–and I was pitying you–I was–”

Young Denny shook him off and crossed and knelt beside the kneeling Hogarty. And at that moment Sutton opened his eyes again and stared dully into the ex-lightweight’s face. After a time recognition began to dawn in that gaze–understanding–comprehension. Once it shifted to Denny, and then came back again. He made several futile efforts before he could make his lips frame the words.

Then, “Amateur,” he muttered, and he managed to rip one glove from a limp hand and hurl it from him as he struggled to sit erect. “Amateur–hell! A-a-a-h, Flash, what’re you tryin’ to hand me?”

CHAPTER XIV

Denny had begun to get back into his clothes, pausing now and then to dabble tentatively at the freshly broken bruise with the wet towel which Ogden had at last forced him to accept, when the door of the dressing-room opened, and Hogarty stepped briskly inside and closed the door behind him.

The ex-lightweight ignored entirely the covertly delighted grin that lit up Bobby Ogden’s features at his appearance. His own too-pale, too-thin lips were curved in a ghost of a smile; his face had lost all its dangerous tautness, but the greatest change of all lay there in his eyes. Their flaring antagonism had burnt itself out. And when Hogarty spoke it was once more in his smoothly perfect, delightfully measured, best professor-of-English style, for all that his opening remark was couched in the vernacular.

“Mr. Bolton,” he began to the boy sitting quiet before him, “it looks as though we would have to hand it to you–which I earnestly desire you to believe I am now doing, with both hands. It may eventually prove that I lost a most valuable assistant through this morning’s little flurry. I am not quite certain yet as to that as Boots is not sufficiently himself to give the matter judicious consideration.

“He still thinks I crossed him for the entertainment’s sake–which is of little immediate importance. What I did come in for was to listen to anything at all that you may have to tell me. You’ll admit, of course, that while your explanation as to your errand was strictly to the point, it was scarcely comprehensive. My own unfortunate temper was, no doubt, largely the cause of your brevity.”

He hesitated a moment, clearing his throat and gazing blankly at the grinning Ogden.

“As Ogden here has of course told you, I’m–well, rather touchy when interrupted at my favorite pastime, and especially so when I am trying to get a few minutes relaxation with a pin-headed person who insists upon playing without watching the board.

“But you spoke of wanting an opportunity of–er–entering the game professionally. I’m not admitting you’re a world-beater, understand–or anything like that! You’ve just succeeded in putting away a man who was as formidable as the best of them, five years ago. And five years isn’t today, by any means. I’ve been looking for a real possibility to appear for so long that I’ve grown exceedingly sensitive at each fresh failure. And yet–and yet, if you did have the stuff–!”

Again he stopped and Denny, watching, saw the proprietor’s face glow suddenly with a savage sort of exultation. His eyes, half-veiled behind drooping lids that twitched a little, went unseeingly over the boy’s head as though they were visualizing a triumph so long anticipated that it had become almost a lost hope. Again that promise of something ominous blackened the pupils–something totally dangerous that harmonized perfectly with the snarl upon his lips.

Hogarty’s whole attitude was that of a man who wanted to believe and yet who, because he knew that the very measure of his eagerness made him doubly easy to convince, had resolved not to let himself accept one spurious proof. And all his skepticism was shot through and through with hate–a deadly, patient sort of hatred for someone which was as easy to see as it was hard for the big-shouldered boy to understand.

There was craft in the ex-lightweight’s bearing–a gentleness almost stealthy when he leaned forward a little, as if he feared that the first abrupt move or word on his part would frighten away that timid hope.

“I believe that you said some one sent you. You–you did not mention the name?”

Denny leaned over and picked up his coat from a chair beside the bench, searching the pockets until he found the card which the plump, brown-clad newspaper man had given him. Without a word he reached out and put it in Hogarty’s hands.

It bore Jesse Hogarty’s Fourteenth Street address across its face. Hogarty turned it over.

“Introducing the Pilgrim,” ran the caption in the cramped handwriting of Chub Morehouse’s stubby fingers. And, beneath, that succinct sentence which was not so cryptic after all:

“Some of them may have science, and some of them may have speed, but after all it’s the man who can take punishment who gets the final decision. Call me up, if this ever comes to hand.”

Very deliberately Hogarty deciphered the words, lifted a vaguely puzzled face to Young Denny, who waited immobile–and then returned again to the card. He even nodded once in thorough appreciation of the title which Morehouse had given the boy; he smiled faintly as he remembered Denny as he had stood there in the entrance of the big room, a short while before, and realized how apt the phrase was. Then he began to whistle, a shrill, faint, monotonous measure, the calculating glitter in his eyes growing more and more brilliant.
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