“Oh, I’ll show ’im!” announced Gunboat, with his chin out and his heels well apart. “He’ll know something when I get through wit’ him. And he’ll have a map like a fried egg!”
“But I don’t want you to——”
“Leave that to me, lady,” interrupted her champion, sensing what he recognized as purely feminine compunctions. “Yuh’ve gotta know when to quit, in this business, the same as when to start. Just leave it to me, and I’ll do it, and do it right!”
“And what,” demanded Teddie in the most businesslike tone of which she was capable, “will you expect me to pay you for this?”
“Pay me?” repeated Gunboat Dorgan, wheeling about on her. “Who said anything about a purse in this bout? I’m not doin’ this for pay.”
“Then what are you doing it for?” asked the slightly perplexed Teddie.
“I’m doin’ it for yuh!” asserted Gunboat, leaning fraternally over the table-end.
“I’ve that little club-roadster of my own,” the entirely unpractical Teddie rather feebly suggested, feeling the appropriateness of some effort to depersonalize the issue. “It wouldn’t be pay, of course. But when you and Ruby settle down in your flat it would be nice for running out into the country in hot weather. You’d take that, surely?”
Gunboat essayed a hand-movement of repudiation which he’d seen quite often in the movies. He was warmly conscious, in fact, of an appeasing touch of the theatrical in this knight-errantry that had bobbed so unexpectedly up at the tail end of a humdrum morning of dub-drilling and bag-punching.
“Noth-thing doin’!” he said with decision. “I get enough out of it when I see that stiff go to the mat. Yuh say he’s goin’ to horn in here at three o’clock. Well, I’ll breeze in at three-two, railroad time. And I’ll learn him to think twice before he flies that zooin’-bug around a girl who’s been born and bred a lady!”