“You’ve said I haven’t lied to you, Miss Sangster, and you were right. I haven’t.” He paused, groping painfully for a correct statement of the situation. “Now do you think you can believe what I am going to tell you? Will you take the word of a … prize-fighter?”
She nodded gravely, looking him straight in the eyes and certain that what he was about to tell was the truth.
“I’ve always fought straight and square. I’ve never touched a piece of dirty money in my life, nor attempted a dirty trick. Now I can go on from that. You’ve shaken me up pretty badly by what you told me. I don’t know what to make of it. I can’t pass a snap judgment on it. I don’t know. But it looks bad. That’s what troubles me. For see you, Stubener and I have talked this fight over, and it was understood between us that I would end the fight in the sixteenth round. Now you bring the same word. How did that editor know? Not from me. Stubener must have let it out … unless ….” He stopped to debate the problem. “Unless that editor is a lucky guesser. I can’t make up my mind about it. I’ll have to keep my eyes open and wait and learn. Every word I’ve given you is straight, and there’s my hand on it.”
Again he towered out of his chair and over to her. Her small hand was gripped in his big one as she arose to meet him, and after a fair, straight look into the eyes between them, both glanced unconsciously at the clasped hands. She felt that she had never been more aware that she was a woman. The sex emphasis of those two hands—the soft and fragile feminine and the heavy, muscular masculine—was startling. Glendon was the first to speak.
“You could be hurt so easily,” he said; and at the same time she felt the firmness of his grip almost caressingly relax.
She remembered the old Prussian king’s love for giants, and laughed at the incongruity of the thought-association as she withdrew her hand.
“I am glad you came here to-day,” he said, then hurried on awkwardly to make an explanation which the warm light of admiration in his eyes belied. “I mean because maybe you have opened my eyes to the crooked dealing that has been going on.”
“You have surprised me,” she urged. “It seemed to me that it is so generally understood that prize-fighting is full of crookedness, that I cannot understand how you, one of its chief exponents, could be ignorant of it. I thought as a matter of course that you would know all about it, and now you have convinced me that you never dreamed of it. You must be different from other fighters.”
He nodded his head.
“That explains it, I guess. And that’s what comes of keeping away from it—from the other fighters, and promoters, and sports. It was easy to pull the wool over my eyes. Yet it remains to be seen whether it has really been pulled over or not. You see, I am going to find out for myself.”