“Now remember what I told you,” he whispered hoarsely. “Keep away from him––keep away and let him do the rushing––for he’s got a punch that’s sudden death! You can tire him out. He’s old and his wind is gone.”
The brass rods had been set up in their sockets in the floor and the space which they outlined in the middle of the room roped off and carpeted with a square of hard, brown canvas. The man called Boots 186 Sutton was already in his corner, waiting, and his attitude toward the whole affair was very patently that of sheer boredom. He barely lifted his eyes as Young Denny crawled through the ropes at the opposite corner, behind the officiously fluttering Ogden. This was merely part of his every day’s work; he spent hours each week either instructing frankly confessed amateurs or discouraging too-confident, would-be professionals. It was only because of the strangely venomous harshness with which Hogarty had given him his orders while he was himself dressing that he vouchsafed Denny even that one glance.
“I want you to get him,” Hogarty snarled. “I want you to get him right from the jump––and get him!––and keep on getting him! Either make him squeal––make him quit––or beat him to death!”
But if Sutton failed to note the play of those muscles that bunched and quivered and ran like live things beneath the skin of the boy’s back, when Bobby Ogden threw off the enveloping wrap with an ostentatious flourish and knelt to lace on his gloves, that disclosure was not entirely lost upon Hogarty. Watching from the corners of his eyes, Bobby saw him scowl and chew his lip as his head came forward a little. And immediately he turned to speak again in a whisper to Boots, squatting nonchalantly in his corner.
“There’s no need, mind, of being careless,” he 187 cautioned. “He––he might have a punch, you know, at that. Some of ’em do––a lucky one once in a while. Just watch him a trifle––and hand it to him good!”
Sutton nodded and rose to his feet. Watch in hand, Hogarty vaulted the ropes, and Ogden, with a last whispered admonition, bundled up the bathrobe and scuttled from the ring.
At that moment Young Denny’s bulkily slender body was even more deceptive. Sutton, even when trained to his finest, would have outweighed him twenty pounds. Now that margin was nearer thirty, and added to that, he was inches less in height. He was shorter of neck, blocky, built close to the ground. And the span of his ankle was nearly as great as that of Denny’s knee.
Comparing them with detail-hungry eyes, Bobby Ogden saw, however, that from the waist up the boy’s clean, swelling body totally shadowed the other’s knotted bulk; he noted that, with arm outstretched, heel of glove against Sutton’s chin, Denny’s reach was more than great enough to hold the other away from him. Hard on the heels of that thought came the realization that that was a fine point of the game utterly outside of the boy’s knowledge.
It was quiet––oddly, peacefully quiet for a second––in that long room. Then in obedience to a nod from Hogarty the lanky boy called Legs languidly 188 touched a bell, and all that peaceful silence was shattered to bits. Ogden shouted aloud, without knowing it, a shrill, dismayed cry of warning, as Sutton catapulted from his corner; he shouted and shut his eyes and winced as if that rushing attack had been launched at himself. But he opened them again––opened them at the sound of a sickening smash of glove against flesh––to see Denny blink both eyes as his whole body rebounded from that blow.
Ogden waited, forgetting to breathe, for the boy to go down; he waited to see his knees weaken and his shoulders slump forward. But instead of shriveling before that pile-driver swing, he realized that Denny somehow was weathering the storm of blows that followed it; that somehow he had managed to keep his feet and was backing away, trying to follow faithfully his instructions.