“My sister—Mr. Burrowes,” said Fillmore faintly. “Mr. Burrowes is Bugs Butler's manager.”
“How do you do?” said Sally.
“Pleased to meecher,” said Mr. Burrowes. “Say...”
“I was just going to the hotel to get something to eat,” said Fillmore.
Mr. Burrowes clutched at his coat-button with a swoop, and held him with a glittering eye.
“Yes, but, say, before-you-go-lemme-tell-ya-somef'n. You've never seen this boy of mine, not when he was feeling right. Believe me, he's there! He's a wizard. He's a Hindoo! Say, he's been practising up a left shift that...”
Fillmore's eye met Sally's wanly, and she pitied him. Presently she would require him to explain to her how he had dared to dismiss Ginger from his employment—and make that explanation a good one: but in the meantime she remembered that he was her brother and was suffering.
“He's the cleverest lightweight,” proceeded Mr. Burrowes fervently, “since Joe Gans. I'm telling you and I know! He...”
“Can he make a hundred and thirty-five ringside without being weak?” asked Sally.
The effect of this simple question on Mr. Burrowes was stupendous. He dropped away from Fillmore's coat-button like an exhausted bivalve, and his small mouth opened feebly. It was as if a child had suddenly propounded to an eminent mathematician some abstruse problem in the higher algebra. Females who took an interest in boxing had come into Mr. Burrowes' life before—-in his younger days, when he was a famous featherweight, the first of his three wives had been accustomed to sit at the ringside during his contests and urge him in language of the severest technicality to knock opponents' blocks off—but somehow he had not supposed from her appearance and manner that Sally was one of the elect. He gaped at her, and the relieved Fillmore sidled off like a bird hopping from the compelling gaze of a snake. He was not quite sure that he was acting correctly in allowing his sister to roam at large among the somewhat Bohemian surroundings of a training-camp, but the instinct of self-preservation turned the scale. He had breakfasted early, and if he did not eat right speedily it seemed to him that dissolution would set in.