But it happens that just now I have only one good card up my sleeve, so I’ll play that for all it is worth, and then wait for something else to leak out and find its way to the mahogany desk where I do stunts like this one.
You will have noticed if you have seen the show, one of the young women who is a bit more athletic than the others. She has a fist that can hand out a scientific punch and an arm to back it up. She wears tights with the rest of the crowd and doesn’t attract special attention until the olio is put on, and then she shines forth as a specialist. She punches the bag in a manner that is truly marvelous, and what she doesn’t do to that pear-shaped leather pendant couldn’t be done by anybody—man or woman.
The medals dancing on her chest as she uppercuts and swings would signify that she is an artiste of more than usual merit, and the self-assurance and confidence she displays during the brief time she is on show that she is quite sure of herself and that she knows the business from the make-up box to the bow at the finish.
Furthermore, in addition to her other accomplishments, she has been known to kick the crown of a hat held six feet from the floor, which, by the way, is no mean trick.
Now a few turns of the leaves of the calendar backward, a wiping out of recent years, and you are at the beginning of the story. Not in New York, but in Ohio—the finish is in the big city, as all good finishes are.
A good-looking, rugged girl was there; a normal girl whose only heritage was health, strength and ambition, which, by the way, in many cases, is better than money. She took in all the shows that came to town, and had about as good a time as any other girl could have under the circumstances. She didn’t get stage struck. She had no ambition to sing or dance before the public, nor did she give a rap about Romeo and Juliet. Nothing like that for her.
You see her time hadn’t come and she had not yet struck her gait.
The first intimation she had that she was stung with the theatrical bee when she saw a bag-punching act in which the man made many misses, but faked it through so that it looked like the real thing.
That was what she had been waiting for all that time and she never knew it. The next day she bought a bag, had a platform rigged up and started in to practice. She worked in a woodshed, I think it was, with no one to teach her, and she hammered and punched until she was about ready to drop from exhaustion, but she never gave up. She would travel anywhere to see a bag-punching act and get a few tips, and although there were not many in the business at that time, especially out in Ohio, the few she did land told her all they knew and that wasn’t half enough.
She had reached that stage when she was fairly good, but didn’t know it, when there blew into the town a 120-pound boxer of about the fourth class who could pound the leather just enough to get a salary that would pay his board and buy a few drinks, but the fact that he was a bag puncher was enough for her, so she made his acquaintance and hustled him around to her improvised gymnasium to show her what he knew. To her surprise there was nothing in his routine that she wasn’t familiar with, and when she went at the bag herself she did a few stunts that made him open his eyes in amazement.