The Venomous Viper of the Volga

In early October, Luke Lewis, prominent promoter in what Bill McGeehan calls the cauliflower industry, conferred with little Sandy King, his press-agent and right-hand man.

“We got to make different plans,” said Luke. “I figured the new champ would be good for one sellout in the Arena this winter and at least one big outdoor show in May or June. But you seen what happened last night. He makes his first public appearance since winning the title, and he gets booed. People don’t want a champion that’s interested in this here anesthetic dancing and bee culture. Match him with anybody but Ryan and he wouldn’t draw flies. What we got to do is leave him lay for a year, till we can put him and Ryan on in a return match.”

“If I was a fighter,” said Sandy, “I wouldn’t want to rest a whole year. I’d be afraid I’d forget all I knew about fighting.”

“It would hurt some fighters,” said the boss, “but they’s others that ain’t got nothing to forget. That’s none of my business, though,” he continued. “What’s bothering me is how to keep the public awake till next fall without giving them a championship bout.”

“Too bad you can’t match Burton and Cook,” said Sandy.

The Cook he referred to was Jem Cook, a colored gentleman known as the Black Bull of Biloxi. He had never whipped anyone but his children, he was middle-aged and slow, his “fighting” was in such flagrant violation of all rules that even the referees found fault with it, and yet a large portion of Fistic Fandom, or Moronia, had long regarded him as the logical contender for the title recently wrested from Jack Ryan by Beau Burton, the Student Prince.

“They’s no place you could hold it,” Luke said. “And further and more, Cook is going to fight Teddy Walsh in Buffalo next week and that means good night Cook. Larry Woltz is the referee. He was born in the South and he’ll see that it’s a fair fight even if he has to tape the black boy’s wrists with a pair of handcuffs.”

“How about a series of trials? Make a list of all the heavyweights we can think of, match them up with each other through the winter and spring, and then, whoever comes through, why, he can meet Ryan. And whichever wins between he and Ryan gets the big match with the Beau.”

“Of course that idear has occurred to me,” said Luke. “I guess it’s the only solution. But you know they ain’t three heavies in the country that could knock the ashes off a cigar, and the public don’t like big fellas that can’t hit.”

“Jimmy Donohue can hit.”

“I said big fellas. Donohue claims one hundred and seventy-five pounds, but I bet you could put him and a cow on the scales together and they wouldn’t weigh one-seventy. Suppose I was to let him in the competition and he beat all these hams, why, it would be a joke to match him with Ryan.”

“Well, there was Carpenteer and Dempsey.”

“Carpenteer was a frog and that makes all the difference. Just tell people that So-and-So is champion of France or Paraguay and they’ll break down your gates even if they know the fella had to be brought off the ship in a wheelchair. Get me a guy from some place abroad and I’m all set. I mean any place but England; when you mention an English champ, everybody thinks of Joe Beckett and takes it as a joke. If somebody would spring up in Spain or Greece or somewheres⁠—But as long as none of those birds are in sight, we better begin figuring on what we’ve got here, and then it’ll be a tough job to fix up some preliminary matches for them that ain’t too silly and yet not too dangerous. Who do you suggest?”

“I was thinking of Fitzgerald and Moran.”

Frankie Fitzgerald, a Romanian known as Fitchburg’s Fighting Fool, and Mike Moran, the Malden Murderer, were a pair of 200-pounders who had been seen together in so many New England rings that Dame Rumor whispered they must be betrothed. It was said that on one occasion, three or four years ago, the Murderer, who had got his sobriquet from a childhood practise of stepping on ants, had tripped in a tear in the canvas and sunk to one knee, but the Fighting Fool had restored him to plumb before the astounded referee began to count. This was the only incident remembered by patient eyewitnesses of the couple’s hundred-odd rounds of petting.

“We’ll have to include them because of the general shortage,” said Luke. “But we’ll also have to find somebody for each of them to lick before we dast bring them together again. And that’s going to be quite a chore.”

“Why not have Fitzgerald beat Donohue, and Moran win from Eddie Brock?”

“Donohue and Brock would have to foul them.”

“Well, they wouldn’t mind doing that if it was worth their while. Donohue is really a middleweight and Brock is a welter, and it wouldn’t hurt neither of their reputations to lose to guys that outweighs the entire Notre Dame football squad.”

“All right,” agreed Luke. “We’ll start to work along those lines and hope for the best. But meanw’ile, you watch the papers and if you run acrost any news from abroad that might relieve the situation, remember where you get your pay. And in order so you won’t overlook nothing, I’ll make you a proposition: Find me a foreigner that ain’t absolutely impossible, and I’ll give you a cash bonus of five grand.”

The conference was over and the diminutive Sandy left the office to keep a luncheon engagement with one Mabel Ives, to whom, for no apparent reason, he was paying court. On the way, he thought a great deal about Mabel and very little about his employer’s talk, until suddenly Luke’s last words recurred to him.

“Five grand!” he said to himself. “Why, with that amount of money in one lump, I could marry her without going into debt. I’ll certainly dig him up a wop or an Armenian if I have to comb Newark!”

But such a desperate measure proved unnecessary, thanks to Miss Ives. She insisted on spending the afternoon at the Palace, though Sandy would much rather have gone to a picture theater because picture theaters are dark. (Miss Ives’ style of beauty was shown to its best advantage in the dark, but that wasn’t why Sandy wanted her there.) Anyway, she made him take her to the Palace and it was lucky she did, from Sandy’s astigmatic point of view, for the third number on the bill brought him to the end of his quest, if so brief and inert a search may be dignified by that term.

“Prentiss, Master Ventriloquist” was the title of the act, but it was not Prentiss and his laryngeal chicanery that impressed little King. It was the physique and diabolic and exotic appearance of an anonymous member of Prentiss’s scant troupe, who played, none too well, the part of a silent sentry in the unusually elaborate Arabian scene which the Master evidently considered essential to proper exposition of high-class ventriloquism.

“There’s the big fella I want!” said Sandy.

“Shut up and let me enjoy the show, or you won’t be the little fella I want!” said his girlfriend.

Sandy sat impatiently through the rest of the bill and was actually glad Mabel had a date that evening with her ukulele teacher.

Harry Soule, stage-manager at the Palace, was a hot fight fan and Sandy had often given him tickets to Arena shows. So it was easy to get backstage and arrange a meeting with Prentiss’s big aid.

“But what do you want of the big bum?” asked the curious Soule. “Are you thinking of making a fighter out of him?”

“No, no,” replied Sandy with a mendacious laugh. “I’m trying to locate his brother, who used to work for us.”

“The big bum,” Henry Goetz by name, was shy at first. He was not accustomed to being wanted by anybody and it seemed unlikely that the little visitor boded well. However, Sandy managed to coax him to a thinly disguised saloon and there to warm him into a less diffident mood.

It developed that he was twenty-four years old, that he had been born in Pennsylvania, that his father’s ancestors were German and that his mother’s people, way back, had lived in Russia. Prentiss was paying him thirty dollars a week, but his engagement was for one week only, as the Master found it possible and economical to break in a new silent sentry at each stand. He had graduated from school at the age of nine and since then had sold newspapers, washed cars, painted barns, worked in a mine and enjoyed vacations lasting anywhere from one to four years. He was six feet two, weighed 208 pounds and had not been in a fight since he was old enough to apologize.

“I don’t suppose you’d mind making a lot of money,” said Sandy.

“How?”

“Boxing. A fella with your build and stren’th is a sucker not to go in the fight game. Especially when they look as much like a fighter as you do. When I seen you on the stage this afternoon, I thought you must be a champion fighter from somewheres in Europe, just doing this thing for fun.”

“Who would I have to fight?”

“Nobody you can’t lick. That is, at first. You’d be matched with a couple of pushovers and you’d make twenty or thirty thousand dollars. And then you’d be in line for the big cleanup, seventy-five or a hundred thousand at least.”

“What cleanup?”

“A match with Jack Ryan.”

“Jack Ryan! Say, my parents is both dead and I ain’t got no other heirs.”

“Don’t be silly! It’s very seldom a man is killed boxing.”

“Just once would be more than enough.”

“Listen: You’ve got a great chance to make a barrel of money with very little work. If you do as I say, in less than a year from now you’ll be fixed so as you won’t never have to think of another job. And I’ll guarantee that Ryan won’t do anything to you that you can’t get over in two days’ time. You look like a pretty bright fella, but if you’re even half-witted, you can’t turn down a proposition like this.”

Well, influenced by Mr. King’s eloquence, the speakeasy’s thirty-proof Scotch and probably by a desire to prove himself half-witted, Henry Goetz finally said yes and promised to put his immediate future in Sandy’s small hands, his salary to be fifty dollars a week until the heavy money began to roll in.

Inasmuch as Sandy’s own pay was only a hundred and it took every cent of it to buy his clothes, lodging and food, and entertainment for Miss Ives, he realized he could not swing his undertaking without help. And next afternoon found him closeted with Willie Troy, a boxing impresario with a bankroll, a real ability to develop “prospects” and a boyish delight in pranks.

Troy was interested and became more so when introduced to Goetz. The latter was certainly big enough and, in spite of his Pennsylvania nativity, looked as alien and homicidal as a taxi driver.

“Have you got any friends?” Troy asked him.

“No,” said the erstwhile trouper.

“I didn’t think so,” said Troy. “But if you had, I was going to warn you to keep away from them and not let them know where you’re at or what you’re doing. From now on you’re a Russian, your name is Ivan Ivanovitch and your nickname is ‘The Venomous Viper of the Volga.’ ”

“You no spika de English,” put in Sandy.

“No,” agreed Troy. “You don’t talk at all. Whatever remarks are addressed to you, you shake your head and act dumb. I don’t believe that will take many rehearsals.”

The Viper became an inmate of the Troy home in the Bronx, which boasted gymnasium space and paraphernalia necessary to a primary education in the manly art. And Sandy King wrote himself a long letter from a mythical friend in Berlin, describing a recent bout between Franz Reum, leading Teutonic heavyweight, and Ivan Ivanovitch, young champion of all the Russias, wherein the German had been knocked cold in Round Two and had remained unconscious for an hour and twelve minutes. Enclosed were snapshots of the new Slav fistic marvel, posed in the almost altogether and displaying a muscular development that reminded one of Monty Munn and the elder Zbyszko.

“Funny they ain’t been nothing in the papers about this guy,” said Luke Lewis when he had read the letter and studied the pictures.

“There will be,” said Sandy. “I hear he’s coming to this country the first of the year.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“From Willie Troy. Willie has known about him quite a w’ile. And he’s been in correspondence with his manager in regards to the American rights.”

The promoter looked his little employee straight in the eye.

“Listen, Sandy,” he said: “I don’t care if your Russian is a Dane from Milwaukee or a Mexican from Montreal, or if his name is Ginsberg or Mussolini. Judging from these photos, he’s just about what I want⁠—a big, tough numskull with the face of an assassin and foreign labels stuck all over him. When you and Willie are ready, bring him around and if he’s anything like his pictures, I’ll give you your five grand and do business with Troy.”

“I forgot to tell you what they call him⁠—the Venomous Viper of the Volga.”

“Who calls him?”

“The fight fans over in Russia.”

“Well, it’s a good name even if you and Troy did make it up. It’s enough to sell him if he didn’t have that build and mush to go with it. On second thoughts, I’ll take a chance on him sight unseen. I’ll give you your check now and I don’t want to look at your fighter till I go down with Troy to meet him at the boat. You realize, of course, that he can’t land here from Russia without getting off a boat.”

“No trouble about that. Troy has been over and back a hundred times and knows most of the captains. The Viper will be taken on at Quarantine, during the night. And by that time he’ll have a Russian manager who can talk enough broken English to entertain the newspaper boys.”

“One more suggestion⁠—you ought to get him tattooed. Pretty near all foreigners is tattooed.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No. Why?”

“Well, I got an idear that Ivan can’t stand pain.”

“That’s a good trait in a fighter,” said Luke.

“It means quick knockouts, which is what people wants to see.”

In the Sunday papers there were pictures of the new Russian peril, with stories of his impressive triumphs at home and announcements of his impending American visit. These appeared in December, just after football, when the sport editors were glad to print anything that was not a final, last, conclusive ultimatum from Judge Landis to Ban Johnson, or vice versa.

And up in the Bronx, Willie Troy was patiently trying to instruct the Viper in the fundamentals of boxing, a sport which the late Mr. Goetz took to as naturally as a walrus to needlework.

“I’m afraid,” the teacher told Sandy, “that when the newspaper boys sees him in the ring, they’ll give him a new nickname. They’ll call him Ivan the Terrible.”

The first of the trial battles was put on after the usual petty annoyances. Principals in this match were Eddie Brock and the Malden Murderer, Moran. The boxing solons came out in flatfooted, flat-headed opposition to the encounter. It seemed there was too great a disparity in size. Moran weighed 206 and Brock about 149. Much discussion and deep thought were required before the masterminds found a solution that ought to have been obvious from the start, namely that Brock, a welterweight, be obliged to train down to the welterweight limit of 147 pounds.

Then, a week prior to the date of the bout, the Murderer’s manager announced it was all off⁠—his man had eaten a bedridden oyster. The truth was that a report had reached camp that Brock, who promised to commit all the fouls in the book no later than the third round, was betting on himself not only to win, but to win by a knockout. The welter was indignant when this came to his ears and he hastened to dispel the effects of the ptomaine poisoning by visiting Moran’s quarters and assuring the coy Murderer that he was not that kind of crook.

“Why, I’m betting on you, big boy,” he said. “I’m betting five thousand dollars of my own money and I had to give two to one. Do you think I’d lay odds against myself if I wasn’t sure to lose!”

And Brock won his wager and speeded Moran on his way to another well-lined purse by punching him three times just above the knee and climaxing the performance with a blow that broke skin already frayed by a garter’s metal. It had to be done a round ahead of schedule, too, for the Murderer had trained on roast goose, mince pie and caramels and would have foundered in another three minutes.

The Viper of the Volga “arrived” in this country early in January. He was accompanied by his native manager and interpreter, Dmitri Sashoff, who in a former existence had been Fred Lister, a head waiter in a café of Troy’s at Providence, and whose Russian vocabulary consisted of the word “ruble.” Luke Lewis, Sandy King, Troy and a crowd of writers, camera men and fans were on hand to welcome the latest European sensation, but the latter, it seemed, had not slept well on board and his present ambition was to hurry to his hotel and rest. Troy, who was to handle him here, would not allow him to go to a hotel, where he might be pestered by enthusiastic admirers, but insisted on taking him at once to his own home in the Bronx, where reporters would be welcome to see him in a few days. The Viper emitted a couple of growls which were interpreted as regrets that he could speak no English and expressions of good will to those who had come to meet him, and was then whisked out to the Troy establishment, which he had left the previous afternoon.

“He’ll have to be introduced from the ring,” said Luke to Willie Troy. “We may as well do that Thursday night, just before Burke and Williams come on.”

“I’ll bring him in for the introduction and take him out right afterwards,” said Troy. “He never seen a fight in his life and he mustn’t see one yet, not till I’ve got him more in hand. What I’m trying to do is make him scareder of me than of fighting itself. I’ll have him that way in a couple more weeks, but if we don’t handle him carefully we’ll lose our meal ticket before it’s punched full of holes.”

“How about announcing that he’s matched to box Teddy Walsh in the next big show?” said Luke.

“Announce it if you want to as long as you don’t mean it.”

“Of course I don’t mean it. But people will take more notice of him if he’s got a good match in sight. And I’ll get Walsh to sprain his wrist or something and force an indefinite postponement.”

“The postponement will have to be more than indefinite. It’ll have to be endless. Because no matter how hard Walsh tried not to, he’d just naturally murder my pet snake.”

“What time of day does he work?”

“The Viper? All day long, three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon. I don’t let up on him a minute.”

“I’d like to see him box sometime.”

“So would I,” said Willie Troy.

The clash between Barney Williams and Red Burke was supposed to be one of the trials, though Luke Lewis had no intention of allowing either of them to cut in on the big money that the outdoor season promised. They were at least as good as any of the other contenders⁠—barring Donohue and Brock, whose poverty of bulk made them undesirable⁠—but they had not always been loyal to Luke. So he hoped their engagement would result in a double knockout, eliminating them both.

However, he temporarily forgot his grudge against them in delight over the ovation accorded the immigrant Ivan when the latter was conducted into the Arena ring by Willie Troy and introduced by the official announcer as “The Ven-ominous Viper of the Vodka.” Ivan all but took his first dive while trying to negotiate the unaccustomed ropes, but the fans overlooked his awkwardness and cheered him to the echo because he was new and bore such a striking resemblance to a fight crowd’s common grandpa, the ape.

Ivan wanted to stay and see the windup, but Troy hustled him out of the building, saying the Arena air was bad for a man in training, and besides it was way past his bedtime. This strategy was well advised, for the Williams-Burke battle would have dissuaded a much stouter-hearted youth than the Viper from pursuing the manly art as a means of livelihood. The contestants were in dead earnest and went at it like a pair of vicious dogs. There were four spills and much letting of blood before Burke ended it by knocking his opponent into the lap of one of the judges. All this in the first, and last, round of fighting.

Willie Troy had long since given up hope of imbuing his pupil either with gladiatorial spirit or sparring skill. He was a clever boxer himself and had been a successful instructor of many green and awkward but willing young men. The Viper was as unwilling as he was awkward and green and Troy soon came to the conclusion that it was a waste of time and effort to try to teach him blocking, ducking, footwork or any of the other requisites of an effective defense. He decided to concentrate on the development of a punch, which seemed comparatively simple in the case of a man with arm and shoulder muscles as mighty as Ivan’s. However, it took all Willie’s powers of persuasion to get his charge to cut loose and strike with his full strength, and even then the only dangerous wallop educed was a roundhouse swing that only a sound sleeper or a paralytic could have failed to evade.

Luke Lewis was becoming impatient and it was impossible to stall him any longer.

“Here it is February, the winter is half gone and your Viper ain’t even matched,” he complained.

“Well, go ahead and match him,” said Willie resignedly. “But I warn you that they ain’t a man living he can beat without the man’s consent.”

“I’ll get the consent all right,” promised Luke. “All I ask is for you to have your fella ready to show the newspaper boys something. If they don’t see him work out, they’ll smell a rat.”

“They’ll smell a whole lot less fragranter rat if they do,” said Troy.

At this stage of the proceedings they got a lucky break. Duke Wallace, manager of Manuel Martinez, paid Troy a visit. Martinez, an import from Indiana, had “come over” three or four years ago and won high public favor by beating all the domestic setups in a series of bouts marked by brevity and bloodshed. With a glowing future, he had suddenly announced his retirement and had given no reason. Now, said Wallace, he wanted to reenter the ring.

“He’s hard up,” his manager explained. “He wants just one more match so his family won’t starve. I heard you was developing some new foreigner and I wondered if we couldn’t get together.”

They could and did.

“Luke will favor fifteen rounds,” said Wallace, “but if it’s the same to you, we’ll hold out for ten. The truth is that the Rugged Rock has got galloping consumption and it might be risky to keep him in there too long.”

“It would certainly be a bad thing for the game in this state to have a man die fighting,” said Troy, “but it looks to me like the best idea is to let both Luke and the public think the bout is for fifteen rounds and Martinez can save himself a lot of punishment by taking his dive in Round One.”

This arrangement proved satisfactory to the Rock’s manager.

“And listen,” added Troy. “It’s understood that your man mustn’t hit mine under any circumstances, and he must stand perfectly still or my man is sure to miss him.”

Wallace said this was all right provided Troy would come across afterwards with five thousand dollars of whatever amount Lewis gave the Viper.

The fans were delighted with the news that at last they were going to get a look at the Russian marvel and particularly that they would see him in action against a fighter who had always given them a run for their money. A packed Arena was assured the instant the bout was scheduled. It was given out that the men had been secretly training so long and so hard that very little additional preparation would be necessary and the managers both took leaves from Carpentier’s book and announced that their charges would put on the finishing touches behind closed doors as they were planning trick attacks and were afraid of spies.

One exhibition was given by each, for newspaper men only. Martinez was a little drawn, but showed much of his old-time speed and artistry in the two brief rounds he sparred. For the Viper’s first non-private demonstration, Willie Troy engaged four big hams who were to get fifty dollars apiece if Ivan floored them and nothing if he didn’t. They all earned their pay. But one or two of the hypercritical scribes remarked that the Russian seemed clumsy and slow.

“That’s in his favor,” said Troy quickly. “He looks like such a big, gawky bum that the other fella thinks he ain’t got nothing, and the next minute, the other fella is laying in the rosin not thinking at all.”

On the night of the fight, the big crowd gave Martinez a rousing cheer for old time’s sake. But they nearly tore the roof off the building with their welcome to the Viper. His appearance in street clothes had charmed them before. In the nearly nude, with a lady’s figure tattooed on each huge arm and a picture of the Easter Parade on the Nevsky Prospect at the corner of Fiftieth Street, Petrograd, covering his ample chest, he was nothing short of irresistible.

Yet the storm of applause and yells that marked his entrance was nothing compared with the pandemonium which followed his quick disposal of the former Rugged Rock, who, appearing mystified by Ivan’s clumsy, amateurish advance, stood perfectly still with his arms at his sides and received on the point of his jaw a carefully aimed right-hand swing that might easily have toppled Roxy’s Theater.

Manuel’s seconds did not wait for a count but climbed through the ropes and carried their unconscious burden to an exit where an ambulance was waiting to take him to a more comfortable bed than the one on which he had flopped so emphatically. And the gulls fought one another and trampled each other under foot in their mad scramble to get close to the new Killer, a foreigner with a punch that made Luis Ángel Firpo’s lethal thump seem like Mrs. Coolidge’s gentlest handshake.

Luke Lewis was riding on top of the world. Little difference did it make to him now whether or not the former champ, Jack Ryan, would consent to come out of his retirement. The Viper was a man who, matched with Beau Burton, would draw the fifty-million-dollar gate that had long been Luke’s dream. And the Viper would be the man to survive the remaining trials even if all the Fitzgeralds and Morans in New England had to be given an annuity. Fitchburg’s Fighting Fool and the Malden Murderer would open the outdoor season, the winner would be knocked for a loop by the Viper, probably early in July, and then it would only be necessary to lease acreage enough to seat 50,000 of America’s most distinguished oafs at a thousand dollars per oaf, for the grand September finale between Beau Burton and Ivan Ivanovitch in what⁠—well, you could hardly call it less than the Battle of the Millennium.

A few details must be arranged. First, there must be a cancellation of a silly match between Fitzgerald, Moran’s New England rival, and Jimmy Donohue, the 170-pounder, who had suddenly become unreasonable and refused to promise to lie down unless he was sleepy. With this matter disposed of, it was deemed wise to assure the public that the Viper would be unable to fight again until he faced the Fitzgerald-Moran winner, for the reason that he could not get anyone to take the chance that had resulted in the death of the poor old Rugged Rock. Several “logical contenders” rose to deny this, but were not believed by a public gone Viper mad.

Came lovely May and the bout between the Fraternal Order of 200-pound New Englanders, a bout regarded in advance as a practical joke, but one which brought the Fighting Fool forward as a greatly improved athlete and an impressive winner over the Murderer from Malden. The Murderer, in fact, was sent to the chair in Round Five, using the crawl stroke to reach his destination.

In the papers of May 24 was a column story to the effect that Frankie Fitzgerald and Ivan Ivanovitch had been signed for the semifinal match in the big elimination tournament of heavyweights and that the match, for the privilege of fighting Beau Burton for the world’s championship, would take place on the evening of July 8.

On the evening of July 7, Sandy King, Luke Lewis’s dapper little press-agent, called up the number of Mabel Ives and was told by Mabel’s mother that Mabel had gone out driving; she didn’t know with whom or when she would be back. Sandy had made the same call and had received the same reply on innumerable previous evenings and had been growing more and more depressed.

Tonight his depression was so great that he felt nothing but a long taxi ride would relieve it. The taxi deposited his 123 pounds of youth and sartorial perfection at an address in the Bronx⁠—the combination dwelling and gymnasium of Willie Troy.

The colored man who answered the door said the Viper had retired.

“He hasn’t retired yet,” said Sandy, “but he’s about to.”

Whereupon he brushed unceremoniously past the guard and found Ivan Ivanovitch alone in the living-room, trying to spell out some of the shorter words on the sporting page.

“Where’s my gal?” said Sandy.

“What do you mean?” asked the Viper.

“What I mean and who I mean is Mabel Ives,” replied Mr. King. “I know all about it.”

“Well,” said the Viper, “she’s went home. But if you knowed all about it, you wouldn’t be calling her your gal. She’s been my gal pretty near ever since I bashed that poor Espagnola. It was them tattoo pictures that made her love me.”

“Would you like her to love you a little stronger?”

“You bet I would! She’s a fine gal.”

“Well, then,” said Sandy, “stand up ’cause I’m going to tattoo you some more.”

When, half an hour later, Willie Troy returned from a final conference with Luke Lewis and the manager of Frankie Fitzgerald, he found the Venomous Viper moaning on the lounge while a retainer tried with various lotions and compresses to reduce the swelling of two discolored eyes and check the insistent flow of what is sometimes called the carmine, from a remodeled and unbecoming mouth and nose.

And next day Luke Lewis was begging Jack Ryan by telegraph to state his lowest terms for an early match with Fitchburg’s Fighting Fool.