The Saint turned and moved almost casually out of his corner to meet the slowly approaching Angel. Bilinski shuffled forward, peering between forearms lifted before him, his body almost doubled over so that his elbows guarded his belly while his gloves shielded his face. No legally vulnerable square inch of his body was unprotected. He came forward steadily, inch by inch, making no attempt to lead or feint, merely coming forward with the massive low-gear irresistibility of a large tank, peering intently, cautiously — almost fearfully, Simon thought — between the bulging barriers of his ham-sized arms.
The Saint moved around him in a leisurely half-circle, every muscle, every nerve completely at ease, relaxed, and coordinated. He was oblivious of the crowd now, studying his problem with almost academic detachment, the latent lightning in his fists perfectly controlled. He couldn’t help feeling the same guarded wonder that he knew Torpedo Smith, and for that matter all of the Angel’s opponents, must have felt at the apparent impotence of the Angel’s attack right up to the moment of the blow that sent them on the way to oblivion. He thought to himself, “Nothing happens the first round... nothing ever happens the first round...” The crux of his problem, he felt sure was what the Angel did to open his victims for the inevitable knockout later on...
Bilinski, apparently growing tired of following Simon round the ring, stopped in the centre and remained there, crouched, merely revolving to follow the Saint’s lackadaisical circumvolutions about him.
The cash customers began to shake the stadium with the drumming of their stamping feet in the familiar demand for action. A demand, Simon thought, which was no more than fair... He stepped in, threw a left that cracked like a whiplash against the Angel’s fleshy forearms, and crossed with a downward-driving right that strove to crash past into the massive belly beyond. But the Angel instinctively brought his arms closer together so that the Saint’s gloved fist thudded into their bone-centred barrier.
Bilinski, visibly startled by the numbing shock of the blow, even though he did catch it on his guard, flung his arms about the Saint in an octopus-like clutch, sagging slightly in order to let his overwhelming weight smother his opponent’s efforts to strike again; but Simon, familiar with the old strength-sapping trick, merely relaxed with him and waited for the referee to come between them.
From her seat at the ringside Patricia Holm, her blonde hair wild with excitement, her hands gripping the arms of her chair, pleaded with tense anxiety, “Watch him, Simon, watch him! Be careful!”
“He’d better watch while he can,” Inspector Fernack gibed sardonically. He leaned back in his seat beside her and yelled, “All right, you Angel, shake him loose and let him have it! Give him one for me!”
The referee was still battling to break the Angel’s drowning-man grip when the bell ended the round.
As he walked to his corner the Saint noticed that there were no boos from the crowd over the inaction of that opening round. There was merely a more intense current of anticipatory excitement, as though everyone felt that they were about to witness a phenomenon of nature which, while it might be delayed somewhat, would take place as ineluctably as a predicted eclipse of the sun...
The betting, Simon knew, was not on whether or not he’d be knocked out, but rather precisely when and how that cataclysmic event would occur.