I sat up in bed and grabbed her hand again.
"Anything?" I asks her.
She looks out the window, gets pale and grits her teeth. You could see she wished she hadn't said it, but she was game and was standin' pat.
"Anything!" she says.
"Then for the love of heaven!" I shoots out, "get me a piece of meat! This egg and milk thing is drivin' me nutty!"
She wheeled around so quick the scared look was still on her face, and for a minute we both just looked. Then she give a kinda nervous little laugh, grabbed both my hands, squeezed 'em like a man—and blew!
Oh, boy! I ain't no hard loser but—
Well, it wasn't no trick at all to get big Arthur to box with the Kid. He took to it like a chorus girl does to a telephone and what puzzled me was why none of them fifty dollar doctors hadn't thought of it before. I guess it was because they was nobody there husky enough to handle him by themselves, because Arthur packed a wallop in each hand that meant curtains, if it landed. Behind that was six-foot-two of bone and about two hundred and forty pounds of muscle.
The Kid labored with him like a mother with a baby. He taught him how to duck, feint, jab, uppercut, swing, stall, rough in the clinches, everything he knew, and Arthur learned awful quick. So quick that we had to cut the bouts down to twenty minutes each, because the big guy didn't know and he was tryin' with every punch!
The doctors told Scanlan to talk operation to him, and the Kid tried it once. Arthur stopped boxin' and looked at him so reproachful that Scanlan refused to mention it again. He said he looked just like a kid that come down Christmas mornin' and found no tree.