“Don’t answer me, boy: it is as I say.”
The bearings were plainly running hot, but luckily at this instant there came wild Hues as the whole negro audience rose to welcome the beginning of the boxing. The old negro boxers, who were seconding the early bouts, came to the ringside, pitched some much tattered gloves into the ring and hoisted two backless chairs into opposite corners. A couple of lanky lads, shivering in serapes, climbed through the ropes to the chairs, were gloved and introduced; then the gong struck and the bouts began.
The boxing, when it did begin, was fast and very skilful: it roused the partisans in the coloured men’s benches to fight with banana skins and half-sucked oranges. There were five, not six “contests of the three rounds,” and only one of the six went to the end of the third round.
“These lads are good at their business,” Captain Cary said.
“Yes, sir; there are two or three fine clever lads among those. That whitish-looking lad who beat the merry one, would be a dangerous boxer if he were fit.”
“Well, I enjoyed that. It was like an English summer; good when it came; but a long time on the road. Now I suppose we shall have to wait again, for the big fight.”
After the bouts of the boys, in the pause before the coming of the heavy-weights, the better seats, which had not been crowded, filled up with whites. Two men came down the gangway and sidled into the vacant ring seats just in front of the two sailors. One of them, who was powerfully built, Sard judged (from his back) to be a likely man, but when he saw his face he changed his mind: it was a rotten face: the muscle had all gone to brothel with the man’s soul.
His companion was a little, grey-bearded man, whose neck was swathed with a rag which partly hid a boil. The boil made him keep his head forward as he spoke. Both men spoke English as they entered. They looked hard at the two sailors for an instant before they sat down; then, having made up their minds that they were just a couple of English sailors, they sat and began to talk in Spanish, which Sard knew very well. The little man talked rapidly and much, using slang. Some of his front teeth were gone. He had a way of drawing his breath sharply through the gaps with a noise of relish. Sard reckoned that the bigger man was a flash townee, the other, probably, a fence. The little man was a spiteful little devil (perhaps the boil was touching him up) with a way of rising in his excitement to a kind of song. Sard thought him a horrid little man, but likely to be clever in his own rather dirty little way.
“Yes, these negroes,” the little man said, in Spanish, “they need to be fed into the hopper and be taught the way again. They are getting too uppish to my liking. I love my black brother, but I love him best with the toe of a boot, to show him he’s got to go. Yes, sir, he’s got to go. This is God’s country: it ain’t going to be any black man’s not while little ’Arry Wiskey is on the tapis.
O yes, it is God’s country,