These were all the answers to his questions that Faunce could find in Southampton. He went back to town that afternoon, and he spent a rollicking evening at the Battersea Gamecock, in the company of Mr. Bolisco and a little knot of his admirers, of whom some were "bookies," and others, members of the pugilists' noble profession. The evening's talk was mostly of the Turf and the prize-ring, and it furnished Faunce with no direct answers to his questions; but it enabled him to turn the full light of his psychological science upon Bolisco's character and temperament.
"A wild beast on two legs," was Faunce's summing up of the pugilist, as he strolled away from the sporting tavern.
He was closeted for an hour next morning with the landlord of the Gamecock, from whom he received more than one direct answer to his questions.
First, as to the link between Kate Delmaine, alias Prodgers, and Jim Bolisco?
Mr. Lodway, the present landlord, had been barman when Bill Prodgers had the Gamecock, and he remembered Kitty Prodgers running about, fifteen years old, a rough-headed girl in a pinafore; but always a beauty, and always with a devil of a temper. She was an only child, and motherless. Nobody knew anything about her mother, who had died before Prodgers took the Gamecock. The girl and her father used to quarrel, and Bolisco, who lodged in the house off and on, used to stick up for her, and Prodgers and he sometimes came to blows.
"And this," concluded Mr. Lodway, "was the beginning of their walking about together."
"They were sweethearts then, Kate and Bolisco?"
"Well, they kind of kep' company, though she was such a kid that nobody thought it was going to lead to anything. Bolisco was a good-looking chap then, before he got his smeller smashed in the mill with the Hammersmith nigger. They kep' company for a year or two, off and on, for it wasn't in Kate to go on long with anybody without quarrelling; and then, after one of her rows with her father, she walks off and gets herself engaged at the Spectacular Theatre, straight off. She was such a clipper at seventeen that she had but to show herself to a manager to get took on. He'd have engaged forty such, I reckon, at the same price. The father was drinking as much as he knew how by that time, and things were going to the bad here, and he took no more trouble about the girl than if she'd been a strayed kitten: but me and one or two more went after her, and found her in decent lodgings in Katherine Street, and as straight as a die. But six months after that she had her house in St. John's Wood, and her brougham, as smart as a duchess; and the mug who was paying the piper was one of Bolisco's patrons, a Yorkshire bart, very young, and as green as a spring cabbage."
"And Bolisco was still hanging about her?"
"Lord! yes; he wasn't likely to lose sight of her while she had the spending of that young softy's rhino."