Kate shook her head. "I'm too old a woman to be learning so many words, Mr. Neale," she said. "And it's not a story I think Father Ryan would like me to be telling. That's not the way the story do be going in our Bible."
"Gosh," thought Peter to himself. "She thinks it was Martin Luther made those changes."
Notwithstanding Goliath, Peter made a gallant attempt to break away from his newly found responsibilities. He felt that he ought to. He felt that in the restaurants and poolrooms there lay the sort of sporting gossip he ought to pick up for his column. Of course, not all New York kept Pat's hours in those days but there was something almost auto-hypnotic in getting the child to sleep. In addition to the bedtime story, Peter found it necessary to feign great weariness in order to suggest a similar feeling in Pat. He would yawn prodigiously immediately after the Red Bat had knocked down David and pretend to doze off on the foot of Pat's bed. Presently, he would hear the boy's regular breathing and would tiptoe out of the room. But Peter acted his rôle much too well. After so much shamming he generally was actually tired himself and indisposed to wander down to Jack's or any of the other places where he might find fighters or their managers.
Indeed, he made the discovery that the material to be extracted from these people was not inexhaustible. Like David and Goliath they had a tendency to run into formula. "And I yell at him, don't box him; fight him. Keep rushing him. Don't let him set. And when he comes to his corner at the end of the third round I bawl in his ear, 'You kike so and so, begging your pardon, Mr. Neale, if you don't get that lousy wop I'm done with you.' And would you believe me it did him a lot of good. It put guts in him. In the fourth we nail him with a right and we win. Now we're going after the champ and if we ever get him into a ring we'll lick him."
A year or so before Neale could have taken stuff like that and worked it over into a column on "The Psychology of a Prizefight Manager." But now all the inspiration was gone. He had heard precisely the same tale in much the same language too many times. He was almost tempted to cry out, "Not lick him, beat him."
Nor was there much more available color in the fighters themselves. They were a silent crowd, most of them, particularly if they happened to have a manager along.
Once, Peter found Dave Keyes, the Brooklyn lightweight, sitting all alone in Jack's. He was going great guns that year and Peter thought of him as the logical successor to the champion. They had met a couple of times at fight clubs, but Keyes did not seem to remember Peter. He was sober but not bright. Still, Peter felt that he might draw him out during the course of the evening. In time Keyes began to talk freely enough. He was even confidential but fighting seemed to be the last thing in the world he cared to discuss.
"You see there's two dames fall for me. And the tough break is the both of them lives on the same block. See. Well, let me tell you how I works it. First I give Helen, that's the blonde one, a ring and then right bang on top of that I has the call switched over to Gracie's flat——."
"Life," thought the harassed Peter Neale, "is just one bedtime story after another."
In the Spring a long swing around the baseball training camps took Peter away for almost two months and another month and a half went in a fruitless journey to Juarez to wait for a fight which never happened. It was June when Peter returned and to his horror he found that the child had picked up theology in his absence. A storm helped the discovery. The roll of the thunder was still a long way off when Peter called it to Pat's attention. "We're going to have a thunderstorm," he said.