For Mr. Masterman was rushing to and fro, as the saying goes, "like a hen on a hot griddle". Talking and gesticulating to the referee—dashing over and shaking his fist in the face of the masked man who leaned back calmly in his stool while his seconds sponged his mouth—then hurrying back and whispering like a soda fountain in the ear of the champion, who reclined against the ropes that stretched behind his seat, restoring himself by deep inhalations and smiling crookedly at his manager's ecstasy of anxiety.
"That mask has got to come off!" Bob Masterman yelled, dashing over again to the referee, "or out of this comes my man. He can fight anything with a face on, but he ain't used to pounding away at a mask."
"Why don't you mask your man, then?" demanded one of the stranger's seconds, who both also wore masks, one red, one black; "That will even things."
"Mask nothing," grunted the monosyllabic Mr. Cluett, sitting up in preparation for the gong; "Beat it, Bob. Keep shirt on. 'M all right."
Round Two commenced with the house, crowded from orchestra pit to gallery, watching in a silence unbroken except for an intermittent creak or cough. Even the light sound of the fighters' shoes on the ring-canvas was audible in seats half-way to the back of the big auditorium. Mr. Masterman, fists clenched in the side-pockets of his coat, feet squared aggressively on the floor, face thrust forward, watched the movements of both men with as much intentness as though he were a kind of auxiliary referee. Miss Yockley, sympathetically reflecting Masterman's moods, had lost her nonchalance. Her mouth half-open; her hands locked together and thrust, knuckles up, under her chin; the whites of her eyes showing in a gawky stare: she watched Cluett let the second round go by with only one light left swing to the neck, countered immediately by the masked man with a lightning right which made Nick shake his head and rub the thumb of his glove across his nostrils. Neither blow did any noticeable damage.
Just before the gong called the boxers to their feet for Round Three, Nick Cluett, leaning back from the flicking towels, beckoned his manager and whispered in the latter's ear, afterwards giving him a whack on the shoulder with his glove as at the conclusion of a joke. Mr. Masterman was seen by Miss Yockley to brighten, and to resume his seat with something very like a smile.
"Clubs is trumps, huh?" Miss Stella relaxed from her nervousness a little to remark. "Well, all hands is glad it ain't spades, brother."
The climax of Round Three came just at its conclusion, after an exhibition of "footwork" that kept the audience clapping. From sparring at long range, the fighters, as though in simultaneous response to the same idea, jumped in close. Their work was so rapid that only those in the front ringside seats saw the terrific jab, all the power of shoulder and torso behind it, with which Cluett tried for the jaw-point, missed by a hair's-width, and stepped back with blood streaming from a contusion, half-cut, half-bruise, above his eye, where the stranger had countered, rapid as rifle-fire, before he could move out of range.
During the rest between Rounds Three and Four, it became almost necessary for the half-crazed Mr. Masterman to be put out of the ring by main force, as he pushed in, caught Cluett by one arm, and tried, in spite of the expostulation of the referee, the reporters, and those in the adjoining ringside seats, and the grinning resistance of Cluett himself, to haul from the ring the champion whose laurel crown he regarded as now no more than perched precariously on the very edge of Nick's scalp.
"Come on!" he said, tugging redly and furiously; "he won't take off his mask, and this bout should have b'en off two rounds ago. Come on—out you come!"