Morehouse began at the very beginning, looking oftener at the card between his fingers than at Hogarty’s too brilliant eyes, which were fairly burning his face.
“In the first place, Flash,” he went on, “you know as well as I do that The Red isn’t a real champion and never will be. He has the build and the punch, and he’s game, too––you’ll have to hand him that. But stacked up against the men who held the title ten years ago he’d last about five rounds––if he was lucky. I don’t know why that is, either, unless he is so crooked at heart that he loses confidence even in himself when he has to face a real man. But the public at this minute thinks he is as great as the greatest. The way he polished off The Texan had convinced them of that––and we––well, the paper always tries to give them what they want, you know.
“Now that was the reason I ran up north last week, after I’d got a tip that Conway hailed originally from a little New England village back in the hills––one of those towns that are almost as up-to-date today as they were fifty years ago. It looked like a nice catchy little story, which I will, of course, admit I could have faked just as well as not. But it was the cartoons I wanted. You can’t really fake them––not after you’ve once known the real thing. And as it happens I have known it, for I came from a village up that way myself.
“And, then, I was curious, too. I’ve always had a private opinion that if chance hadn’t pitchforked Conway into the prize-ring he’d have made a grand success as a blackjack artist or a second-story man. But I wanted the pictures, and it wasn’t a very difficult matter either to get them. You see I knew just where I’d find what I wanted, and things panned out pretty much as I thought they would.
“It didn’t take more than a half hour to spread the report that Conway was practically the only really famous man in the country today, and in a fair way to make his own home town just as celebrated. It may sound funny to you, for you don’t know the back-country as I do, but just that short article in the daily, coupled with a few helpful hints from me that I was looking for all the nice, touching incidents of his boyhood days, with the opinions of the oldest inhabitants, and maybe a few of their pictures to be used in a big Sunday feature, brought them all out: the old circle of regulars which always sits around the tavern stove nights, straightening out the country’s politics and attending strictly to everybody’s affairs but their own.
“Eager? Man, it was a stampede! I reckon that every male inhabitant within a radius of five miles was there when I opened the meeting with a few choice words––every man but one, and he comes in just a little later in this tale. They surely did turn 207 out. It was as perfect a mass meeting as any I’ve ever seen, but the crowd itself didn’t get much of a chance to talk––not individually anyhow. They were simply the chorus of ‘ayes’ which the town’s big man paused now and then for them to voice.
“He did the talking, Flash. They called him ‘Judge’––they most always do in those towns. He most certainly monopolized the conversation, and while he gave his monologue, I sat and got the best of them down on paper. They thought I was taking notes. I’ll show you his picture some day. He’s the meanest man I ever met yet––and I’ve met a few! Puffy-faced and red, and too close between the eyes. Fat, too! Somehow I’m ashamed of being plump myself, since meeting him.
“He did all the talking, and from the very first time he opened his mouth I knew he was lying. You can always tell a professional liar; he lies too smoothly, somehow. Well, to judge from his story Conway was the only unspotted cherub child that had ever been born and bred in that section. Oh, yes, he’d seen the promise in Conway; he knew that Conway was to be the pride and joy of the community, right from the first. He’d always said so! Why, he was the very man who had given him his first pointers in the game, when he was cleaning up all the rest of the boys in town, just by way of recreation. If I’d never had a suspicion before I’d have known just 208 from those slick sentences of his that Conway had never been anything in that village but a small-sized edition of the full-blown crook he is today.
“But I didn’t have any reason to contradict him, did I? He was doing all that I could ask, and more. For there wasn’t a man in that whole crowd who dared to sneeze until he got his cue from the Judge. But that fat man got his jolt finally, just the same, and got it good, too.