Argosy All-Story Weekly, May 5, 1928 — page 50: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

616 teach you what I know, and we'll clean up big.” Barry was keeping his eye on the prone figure, but when he heard the owner of the voice addressed as * Nick,” he turned. “Yeah, there’s real dough in those fists,” Nick the Grik was saying. “T shouldn’t have struck him so hard,” apologized Barry, with an un- comfortable feeling that the gentleman who had a proprietary interest in the ten ball was an unreasonably long time coming back to a state of conscious- ness. “Aw, him?’ Nick pointed con- temptuously with a thumb. “ He’s had a poke in the jaw coming to him for a long time.” Then he raised his voice: ‘‘ Johnny, toss some ice water on this customer and watch the cash register till we git back. Come along.” CHAPTER X. “ BASY JACK.” N a few minutes Barry found him- self seated across a marble-topped table in a Roumanian resturant not far from the pool room. “ Now le’me tell you,” Nick was saying in the manner of an old soldier to a young one, “ there’s big money in the fight racket and you don’t have to be a champ to get it either. There’s bruisers that are making forty, fifty, yeah, a hundred grand a year and never putting on half so good a show as you did with that one crack back there in the pool room.” “But I don’t know anything about the boxing business,” protested Barry. “'That’s why you need a manager,” insisted Nick. “I can handle you swell, so that there’ll be plenty of jack for the both of us. Look at Jack Dempsey; he’s rich and not so many years ago he was riding the rods.” ~ “ But I’m no Dempsey; [ only weigh about one sixty.” ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. “We'll build you up to one seventy. As a light heavy, boy!’ Nick rolled his eyes as one over- come by beautiful thoughts. “* Now listen,” pleaded Barry, “ you saw me hit a boozy man and knock him out. That doesn’t prove I’d be any good in a ring. Why, anybody could have put that bum out.” Barry didn’t quite believe that, but he wanted to hear Nick say how good he was, and Nick was in an obliging frame of mind. “Anybody could, huh?’ WNick’s voice was shrill with the stress of his sarcasm. “Anybody boloney! Any- body applesauce. You don’t know who that bum is, do you?” Well, I'll bite, who is he?” “Get this,’ . commanded Nick. “That guy is Kid Boru and six years ago he was middleweight champ for about two weeks. That’s who he is. Ast anybody that ever saw him fight if he was easy to knock out. Just ast "eth. “But he was getting ready to hit me with a pool ball,” argued Barry. “If he’s so good why didn’t he de- pend on his fists?” “Say, that bozo’s always been able to take it, but the reason he’s a has been is on account of his hands. They’s brittle.” A warm sensation was beginning to make itself felt in the pit of Barry’s stomach. Last week he would have been prepared to defend the affirma- tive side of a debate on the question: Resolved that all of the money making opportunities in America have been snatched up. He had felt himself to be a hopeless failure. And now he was listening to an apparently sane man propose that he start out to enrich himself as a prize fighter. The funny part of it all was that the proposal sounded perfectly feasible. It was almost with regret that Barry re- nounced the scheme in his own mind as he reminded himself that his table EOPMICL OO KS (E@)