"He's one wise kid," said Miss Stella, yawning. "I wish they's quit killin' time with stuff like that, though, an' call on the big bout. Wait till you see Nicky Cluett at work. Wait till you see Nicky Cluett at work! He's offering a thousand dollars to-night to anybody that will out-point him in four rounds. This is one time, honey, when you and I are billed to see some fun—more farce-comedy than fightin' though—when these half-baked fighters comes after Nick's money."
Miss Yockley's wish was not long in being gratified. The second "preliminary" was less than one round in duration, and afforded Daisy, for the first time in her life, that rather sickening spectacle of a strong man sprawled half-unconscious over the straining ropes of a ring, trying vainly to rise to his feet, while another waited with tensed body to strike him down again as soon as his weak knees left the sawdust floor in their slow painful uprising.
"Aw, get the ambulance," fanned Miss Yockley loudly, chewing gum. "That referee can't count past 8."
"What's the matter with that poor man?" said Daisy, all sympathy.
"Oh, nothin'," said Miss Stella. "Wants to have a little sleep, I guess. Oh—at last!"
For the referee, concluding his measured count to 10 while the fallen man still rested on hand and knee, had turned brusquely, caught the gloved hand of the other fighter, and thrust it up in the air in token of a win.
"O' course he's the winner," snorted Miss Daisy's companion; "they should never have took that other fellow away from his sandwich job. He can't stand up without he's got a couple of sign-boards to brace him.... But look, honey; here's our Nicky. Always inspects the ring like that, so's the boy that goes down in front of him within the first ten seconds after Nick gets in action, can't claim he slipped on a banana peel."
Daisy withdrew her eyes from their sympathetic following of the limp victim of the second preliminary bout, as the latter's seconds, a shoulder under each of his armpits, escorted him wabblingly back into the wings.
As she looked again at the roped square, she saw that in the interval there had hopped into the enclosure her partner of the dance in the park pavilion, Nick Cluett, a boxer of the kind that is born and not made. Hither and thither, slim and lithe in his gay-colored bath-robe, he moved—stamping the floor here and there with a testing heel, trying the tautness of the ropes, saying nothing, but noticing everything.
"They can't never put nothin' over on Nicky," commented Miss Yockley, more than generous with her negatives when she wanted to be emphatic. "They used to lay traps for him, when they seen how he was comin' on in the boxing game—for some of these here so-called 'sports' is the meanest, trickiest skates this side of the Hot Place. But after Nick showed up a couple o' them kind of low-down promoters, by bawling them out right in front of the audience, so's everybody could get a line on them, they let up on their monkey-work. They don't try nothin' now; but Nick, he always gives everything the onct-over, to be on the safe side."