It did not take Stubener long to find out that Glendon intended
extending the distance of the fight, though try as he would he could
get no hint of the number of the round. He wasted no time, however,
and privily clinched certain arrangements with Nat Powers and Nat
Powers' manager. Powers had a faithful following of bettors, and the
betting syndicate was not to be denied its harvest.
On the night of the fight, Maud Sangster was guilty of a more daring
unconventionality than any she had yet committed, though no whisper of
it leaked out to shock society. Under the protection of the editor,
she occupied a ring-side seat. Her hair and most of her face were
hidden under a slouch hat, while she wore a man's long overcoat that
fell to her heels. Entering in the thick of the crowd, she was not
noticed; nor did the newspaper men, in the press seats against the
ring directly in front of her, recognize her.
As was the growing custom, there were no preliminary bouts, and she had
barely gained her seat when roars of applause announced the arrival
of Nat Powers. He came down the aisle in the midst of his seconds,
and she was almost frightened by the formidable bulk of him. Yet he
leaped the ropes as lightly as a man half his weight, and grinned
acknowledgment to the tumultuous greeting that arose from all the
house. He was not pretty. Two cauliflower ears attested his profession
and its attendant brutality, while his broken nose had been so often
spread over his face as to defy the surgeon's art to reconstruct it.
Another uproar heralded the arrival of Glendon, and she watched him
eagerly as he went through the ropes to his corner. But it was not
until the tedious time of announcements, introductions, and challenges
was over, that the two men threw off their wraps and faced each other
in ring costume. Concentrated upon them from overhead was the white
glare of many electric lights--this for the benefit of the moving
picture cameras; and she felt, as she looked at the two sharply
contrasted men, that it was in Glendon that she saw the thoroughbred
and in Powers the abysmal brute. Both looked their parts--Glendon,
clean cut in face and form, softly and massively beautiful, Powers
almost asymmetrically rugged and heavily matted with hair.
As they made their preliminary pose for the cameras, confronting
each other in fighting attitudes, it chanced that Glendon's gaze
dropped down through the ropes and rested on her face. Though he
gave no sign, she knew, with a swift leap of the heart, that he had
recognized her. The next moment the gong sounded, the announcer cried
"Let her go!" and the battle was on.
It was a good fight. There was no blood, no marring, and both were
clever. Half of the first round was spent in feeling each other out,
but Maud Sangster found the play and feint and tap of the gloves
sufficiently exciting. During some of the fiercer rallies in later
stages of the fight, the editor was compelled to touch her arm to
remind her who she was and where she was.
Powers fought easily and cleanly, as became the hero of half a
hundred ring battles, and an admiring claque applauded his every
cleverness. Yet he did not unduly exert himself save in occasional
strenuous rallies that brought the audience yelling to its feet in
the mistaken notion that he was getting his man.
It was at such a moment, when her unpractised eye could not inform
her that Glendon was escaping serious damage, that the editor leaned
to her and said:
"Young Pat will win all right. He's a comer, and they can't stop
him. But he'll win in the sixteenth and not before."
"Or after?" she asked.
She almost laughed at the certitude of her companion's negative. She
knew better.
Powers was noted for hunting his man from moment to moment and round to
round, and Glendon was content to accede to this program. His defense
was admirable, and he threw in just enough of offense to whet the edge
of the audience's interest. Though he knew he was scheduled to lose,
Powers had had too long a ring experience to hesitate from knocking his
man out if the opportunity offered. He had had the double cross worked
too often on him to be chary in working it on others. If he got his
chance he was prepared to knock his man out and let the syndicate go
hang. Thanks to clever press publicity, the idea was prevalent that at
last Young Glendon had met his master. In his heart, Powers, however,
knew that it was himself who had encountered the better man. More than
once, in the faster in-fighting, he received the weight of punches
that he knew had been deliberately made no heavier.
On Glendon's part, there were times and times when a slip or error
of judgment could have exposed him to one of his antagonist's
sledge-hammer blows and lost him the fight. Yet his was that almost
miraculous power of accurate timing and distancing, and his confidence
was not shaken by the several close shaves he experienced. He had
never lost a fight, never been knocked down, and he had always been
so thoroughly the master of the man he faced, that such a possibility
was unthinkable.
At the end of the fifteenth round, both men were in good condition,
though Powers was breathing a trifle heavily and there were men in
the ringside seats offering odds that he would "blow up."
It was just before the gong for the sixteenth round struck that
Stubener, leaning over Glendon from behind in his corner, whispered:
"Are you going to get him now?"
Glendon, with a back toss of his head, shook it and laughed mockingly
up into his manager's anxious face.
With the stroke of the gong for the sixteenth round, Glendon was
surprised to see Powers cut loose. From the first second it was
a tornado of fighting, and Glendon was hard put to escape serious
damage. He blocked, clinched, ducked, sidestepped, was rushed backward
against the ropes and was met by fresh rushes when he surged out to
center. Several times Powers left inviting openings, but Glendon
refused to loose the lightning-bolt of a blow that would drop his
man. He was reserving that blow for two rounds later. Not in the
whole fight had he ever exerted his full strength, nor struck with
the force that was in him.
For two minutes, without the slightest let-up, Powers went at him
hammer and tongs. In another minute the round would be over and the
betting syndicate hard hit. But that minute was not to be. They had
just come together in the center of the ring. It was as ordinary
a clinch as any in the fight, save that Powers was struggling and
roughing it every instant. Glendon whipped his left over in a crisp
but easy jolt to the side of the face. It was like any of a score of
similar jolts he had already delivered in the course of the fight. To
his amazement he felt Powers go limp in his arms and begin sinking
to the floor on sagging, spraddling legs that refused to bear his
weight. He struck the floor with a thump, rolled half over on his
side, and lay with closed eyes and motionless. The referee, bending
above him, was shouting the count.
At the cry of "Nine!" Powers quivered as if making a vain effort
to rise.
"Ten!--and out!" cried the referee.
He caught Glendon's hand and raised it aloft to the roaring audience
in token that he was the winner.
For the first time in the ring, Glendon was dazed. It had not been a
knockout blow. He could stake his life on that. It had not been to
the jaw but to the side of the face, and he knew it had gone there
and nowhere else. Yet the man was out, had been counted out, and he
had faked it beautifully. That final thump on the floor had been a
convincing masterpiece. To the audience it was indubitably a knockout,
and the moving picture machines would perpetuate the lie. The editor
had called the turn after all, and a crooked turn it was.
Glendon shot a swift glance through the ropes to the face of Maud
Sangster. She was looking straight at him, but her eyes were bleak and
hard, and there was neither recognition nor expression in them. Even
as he looked, she turned away unconcernedly and said something to
the man beside her.
Powers' seconds were carrying him to his corner, a seeming limp wreck
of a man. Glendon's seconds were advancing upon him to congratulate him
and to remove his gloves. But Stubener was ahead of them. His face was
beaming as he caught Glendon's right glove in both his hands and cried:
"Good boy, Pat. I knew you'd do it."
Glendon pulled his glove away. And for the first time in the years
they had been together, his manager heard him swear.
"You go to hell," he said, and turned to hold out his hands for his
seconds to pull off the gloves.