To Dan Rorke himself—fresh from the puddling gang, and seeing the fight game only through Red Keegan’s gimlet eyes—there was nothing wrong or even doubtful in his own methods. He took his orders from Keegan; and his share of the cash profits. He did not bother his thick head about ethics.
It was a week after the Rorke-Feltman battle, and while Kid Feltman was still making the sporting world ring with his cries of trickery and his clamour for a return match. Rorke and his manager had gone back to their home town of Pitvale; not only for a needed rest, but to let certain unjust and cruel accusations blow over. Rorke, some months earlier, had been installed in the biggest room of the manager’s Pitvale bungalow; and had settled thus in the first semblance of a home he had ever known since his graduation from the orphan asylum, twelve years agone. Behind the bungalow was the rickety barn which served as his training quarters.
Dan’s old fellow toilers of the Pitvale Steel Works had bet loyally on their former associate in his fight with the redoubtable Feltman. Even though their paladin had won on a foul, still he had won, and they had cashed in on their bets. Gratitude welled high in their souls. And it took a practical form.
On the morning of the eighth day after the match, a delegation of five puddlers invaded the Keegan bungalow at breakfast time; escorting among them a big young collie dog, gold and white in hue, classic in outline, kingly in bearing.
The pup had belonged to the foreman of the night shift, who was taking a job somewhere out West and could not carry his pet along. So the boys had bought him cheap; and now presented him in due and ancient form to Dan Rorke, as a pledge of their hero worship.
In all his twenty-four years Rorke never before had had a dog of his very own. Such luxuries had not been encouraged at the orphan asylum, nor at any of the steel-works boarding houses where he had since lived.
Now, at sight of the splendid beast, the friendship of a normal man for a good dog woke within him. In spite of Keegan’s sour protests, the pup was installed in the bungalow as a permanent member of the household. In honour of the champion who just then was the idol of Rorke’s profession, the newcomer received the historic name of “Jeff.”
An instant and perfect liking sprang up between Jeff and his middleweight master. From the first the two were inseparable. For some reason best known to himself, the young collie accepted the fighter as his one and eternal lord; and lavished on him a single-hearted devotion he had never granted to his former uninterested owner.
To Rorke the dog was a revelation. His starved heart went out to the collie’s staunch friendliness. His sluggish imagination was stirred to unguessed depths by the dog’s flashes of cleverness and of gay loyalty. His vanity—and something deeper—was touched to the quick by the deathless worship in his pet’s eyes.
If Dan Rorke strayed through the town, for the sake of giving the Pitvalians the privilege of gazing on their foremost citizen, Jeff was always trotting gravely at his side. If he suppled his hard muscles by a ten-mile hike through woodland and over mountain, the collie’s plumed tail was ever just ahead, as pacemaker for the trip.