“Can you last it out?” Loney asked.
When I tried to answer him I found that I could not! move my lower lip because the inside of it was stuck on a broken tooth. I put a thumb up to it and Loney pushed my glove away and pulled the lip loose from the tooth.
Then I said, “Sure. I’ll get the hang of it pretty soon.”
Loney made a queer gurgling kind of noise down in his throat and all of a sudden put his face up close in front of mine so that I had to stop looking at the floor and look! at him. His eyes were like you think a hophead’s are. “Listen, Kid,” he says, his voice sounding cruel and hard, almost like he hated me. “To hell with this stuff. Go in and get that mug. What the hell are you boxing for? You’re a fighter. Get in there and fight.”
I started to say something and then stopped, and I had a goofy idea that I would like to kiss him or something and then he was climbing through the ropes and the gong rang.
I did like Loney said and I guess I took that round by a pretty good edge. It was swell, fighting my own way again, going in banging away with both hands, not swinging or anything silly like that, just shooting them in short and hard, leaning from side to side to get everything from the ankles up into them. He hit me of course but I figured he was not likely to be able to hit me any harder than he had in the other rounds and I had stood up under that, so
I was not worrying about it now. Just before the gong
rang I threw him out of a clinch and when it rang I had
him covering up in a corner.
It was swell back in my corner. Everybody was yelling all around except Loney and Dick and neither of them said a single word to me. They hardly looked at me, just . at the parts they were working on and they were rougher with me than they ever were before. You would have thought I was a machine they were fixing up. Loney was not looking sick ‘any more. I could tell he was excited because his face was set hard and still. I like to remember him that way, he was awful good-looking. Dick was whistling between his teeth very low while he doused my head with
a sponge.
I got Perelman sooner than I expected, in the ninth. The first part of the round was his because he came out moving fast and left-handing me and making me look pretty silly, I guess, but he could not keep it up and I got in under one of his lefts and cracked him on the chin with a left hook, the first time I had been able to lay one on his head the way I wanted to. I knew it was a good one even before his head went back and I threw six punches at him as fast as I could get them out — left, right, left, right, left, right. He took care of four of them but I got him on the chin again with a right and just above his trunks with another, and when his knees bent, a little and he tried to clinch I pushed him away and smacked him on the cheek bone with everything I had.
Then Dick Cohen was putting my bathrobe over my shoulders and hugging me and sniffling and cursing and
laughing all at the same time, and across the ring they were propping Perelman up on his stool.
“Where’s Loney?” I asked.
Dick looked around. “I don’t know. He was here. Boy, was that a mill!”
Loney caught up to us just as we were going in the dressing-room. “I had to see a fellow,” he said. His eyes were bright like he was laughing at something, but he was white as a ghost and he held his lips tight against his teeth even when he grinned kind of lopsided at me and said, “It’s going to be a long time before anybody beats you, Kid.”