It didn’t get away from him, for he married her as soon as he could find the money to pay a minister, and that didn’t take very long.
He fixed up an act which might have been better, but which was good enough to get work with reasonable regularity. There was only one thing to it and that was her bag punching, and if it hadn’t been for his hustling around and getting dates he would have been a rank case of excess baggage. In the meantime, he was teaching her how to box, and when the act grew stale they had a boxing finish that never failed to go big with the crowd.
All this time she was learning. She hunted up every bag puncher of note in the country and gathered in the tips, and when she wasn’t busy with anything else she was framing up something new for herself. All this tended to give her a muscular development that was worth having and that many an athlete would have been proud of.
Her reputation was on the increase and she began to be known. The first step had been made, and it became a comparatively easy thing to get booking in Europe. The skate she was tied to began to swell up a bit, and during the seven days they were on the ship bound for Liverpool he got it into his head that he was the real one and that she was a side issue.
“Don’t ever forget,” he said to her when they reached London, “that I am the real fellow. I dug you out of a woodshed and put you where you are now and if you try to get gay with me, I’ll send you back there, and I’ll get another one just as good as you are.”
He thought he was the real candy boy, and he started in to cut a wide swath. He chased every petticoat that came along, blew in their joint salary at the cafes, and the only time she saw him was when they were doing their act.
In Berlin she happened to walk in the cafe connected with the music hall at which they were working, and she saw him sitting at one of the tables trying to fill a 160-pound blonde with Rhine wine.
“Don’t you think it is about time to cut this out?” she asked.
“Didn’t I tell you to keep away from me and not butt in where you’re not wanted?” he said.
“Yes; but I think I have something to say. I’m not a wooden image, am I?”