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I was, you know, that year, the Citizen’s Anti-Graft leader in the 50th Ward.... I am, still, if I live; and if I ever can get anything into my head except the stupendous din of this war and the cataclysmic problems depending upon its outcome.... Well, it was odd to remember that petty political conflict as I stood there in the trenches under the gigantic shadow of world-wide disaster to find myself there, talking with this sallow, wiry, shifty ward leader this corrupt little local tyrant whom I had opposed in the 50th Ward this ex-lightweight bruiser, ex-gunman this dirty little political procurer who had been and was everything brutal, stealthy, and corrupt.
For a long moment or two that mutual inspection endured; then the boy's lips moved open with a smile that was far graver than his gravity had been and he started slowly across the floor toward the table. Hogarty half rose, one hand outstretched as if to halt him, but for some reason which the ex-lightweight scarcely understood himself, he failed to utter the protest that was at his tongue's end.
"La Boxe" were the words which Max began to hear repeated, and a boxer was what the man looked like: a second or third rate professional. Max wished that he could catch what was being said, for boxing was one of his own accomplishments. He boxed so well that once, before he was twenty-one, he had knocked out his master, an ex-lightweight champion, in three rounds.
The ex-lightweight proprietor was sitting with his chin clasped in both palms, still staring at the half facetious words of introduction which the plump newspaper man had penciled across that card, when the door of the small office in the front of the gymnasium was pushed open a crack, some scant fifteen minutes after his peremptory summons had gone out over the wire, and made him lift his head.
Hogarty's hard eyes could be very hard hard and chilling as chipped steel and they were that now. He was only just beginning to awake to a realization of that profaned floor, but the smile upon Denny's mouth neither disappeared nor stiffened in embarrassment before that forbidding countenance. Instead he held out his hand a big, long-fingered, hard-palmed hand toward the ex-lightweight proprietor.
The ex-lightweight ignored entirely the covertly delighted grin that lit up Bobby Ogden's features at his appearance. His own too-pale, too-thin lips were curved in a ghost of a smile; his face had lost all its dangerous tautness, but the greatest change of all lay there in his eyes. Their flaring antagonism had burnt itself out.
No man ever flung it into my face that I didn't give him a chance not and got away with it." Hogarty glanced meaningly down at the restraining hand upon his sleeve and Ogden removed it hastily. He stood in dismayed indecision until the ex-lightweight had disappeared before he turned toward Young Denny, who had been watching in silence his effort at intervention. Denny had not moved.
From Third Avenue to the waterfront any one who was well-informed at all and there was no one who had not at least heard whispers of his fame knew that the thin-faced, hard-eyed, steel-sinewed ex-lightweight who dressed in almost funeral black and white and talked in the hushed, measured syllables of a professor of English, loved one thing even more than he loved to see his own man put over the winning punch in say the tenth.
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