That night, after receiving the editor’s final dictum that there was not a square fighter in the game, Maud Sangster cried quietly for a moment on the edge of her bed, grew angry, and went to sleep hugely disgusted with herself, prize-fighters, and the world in general.

The next afternoon she began work on an interview with Henry Addison that was destined never to be finished. It was in the private room that was accorded her at the “Courier-Journal” office that the thing happened. She had paused in her writing to glance at a headline in the afternoon paper announcing that Glendon was matched with Tom Cannam, when [119]one of the door-boys brought in a card. It was Glendon’s.

“Tell him I can’t be seen,” she told the boy.

In a minute he was back.

“He says he’s coming in anyway, but he’d rather have your permission.”

“Did you tell him I was busy?” she asked.

“Yes’m, but he said he was coming just the same.”

She made no answer, and the boy, his eyes shining with admiration for the importunate visitor, rattled on.

“I know’m. He’s a awful big guy. If he started roughhousing he could clean the whole office out. He’s young Glendon, who won the fight last night.”

“Very well, then. Bring him in. We don’t want the office cleaned out, you know.”

No greetings were exchanged when [120]Glendon entered. She was as cold and inhospitable as a gray day, and neither invited him to a chair nor recognized him with her eyes, sitting half turned away from him at her desk and waiting for him to state his business. He gave no sign of how this cavalier treatment affected him, but plunged directly into his subject.

“I want to talk to you,” he said shortly. “That fight. It did end in that round.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I knew it would.”

“You didn’t,” he retorted. “You didn’t. I didn’t.”

She turned and looked at him with quiet affectation of boredom.

“What is the use?” she asked. “Prize-fighting is prize-fighting, and we all know what it means. The fight did end in the round I told you it would.”

“It did,” he agreed. “But you didn’t [121]know it would. In all the world you and I were at least two that knew Powers wouldn’t be knocked out in the sixteenth.”

She remained silent.

“I say you knew he wouldn’t.” He spoke peremptorily, and, when she still declined to speak, stepped nearer to her. “Answer me,” he commanded.

She nodded her head.

“But he was,” she insisted.

“He wasn’t. He wasn’t knocked out at all. Do you get that? I am going to tell you about it, and you are going to listen. I didn’t lie to you. Do you get that? I didn’t lie to you. I was a fool, and they fooled me, and you along with me. You thought you saw him knocked out. Yet the blow I struck was not heavy enough. It didn’t hit him in the right place either. He made believe it did. He faked that knockout.” [122]

He paused and looked at her expectantly. And somehow, with a leap and thrill, she knew that she believed him, and she felt pervaded by a warm happiness at the reinstatement of this man who meant nothing to her and whom she had seen but twice in her life.

“Well?” he demanded, and she thrilled anew at the compellingness of him.

She stood up, and her hand went out to his.

“I believe you,” she said. “And I am glad, most glad.”

It was a longer grip than she had anticipated. He looked at her with eyes that burned and to which her own unconsciously answered back. Never was there such a man, was her thought. Her eyes dropped first, and his followed, so that, as before, both gazed at the clasped hands. He made a movement of his whole body toward her, impulsive and involuntary, as [123]if to gather her to him, then checked himself abruptly, with an unmistakable effort. She saw it, and felt the pull of his hand as it started to draw her to him. And to her amazement she felt the desire to yield, the desire almost overwhelmingly to be drawn into the strong circle of those arms. And had he compelled, she knew that she would not have refrained. She was almost dizzy, when he checked himself and with a closing of his fingers that half crushed hers, dropped her hand, almost flung it from him.

“God!” he breathed. “You were made for me.”

He turned partly away from her, sweeping his hand to his forehead. She knew she would hate him forever if he dared one stammered word of apology or explanation. But he seemed to have the way always of doing the right thing where she was concerned. She sank into [124]her chair, and he into another, first drawing it around so as to face her across the corner of the desk.

“I spent last night in a Turkish bath,” he said. “I sent for an old broken-down bruiser. He was a friend of my father in the old days. I knew there couldn’t be a thing about the ring he didn’t know, and I made him talk. The funny thing was that it was all I could do to convince him that I didn’t know the things I asked him about. He called me the babe in the woods. I guess he was right. I was raised in the woods, and woods is about all I know.

“Well, I received an education from that old man last night. The ring is rottener than you told me. It seems everybody connected with it is crooked. The very supervisors that grant the fight permits graft off of the promoters; and the promoters, managers, and fighters graft [125]off of each other and off the public. It’s down to a system, in one way, and on the other hand they’re always—do you know what the double cross is?&r............