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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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The Spider, September 1939, with "In This Corner—Kid Death"
It was a grim prizefight that Gaxter's gang had arranged—with Death for the referee and only Doc Turner there to meet the grisly challenge at the final bell!
TWO things about the man caught Andrew Turner's immediate attention. The first was his great size—a hugeness not of obesity but of bones grandly moulded, of a frame heroically proportioned. The second was the way he stumbled into the herb-redolent dimness of Turner's drugstore on Morris Street. He lumbered a pace or two along the rutted floor—gropingly, blindly. And this, because of his size, was pitiful.
His great body loomed against the faded showcases, the bottle-serried walls, quivering with tension. His arms extended stiffly down, slanting a bit forward. His massive fists were turned a little to the front, not prepared for attack or defense but holding tight in his agony—as Samson's might have in Gaza.
A shaft of early afternoon sunlight, slum-grimed, shadow-barred by the "El" trestle that roofs Morris Street, lay across his hatless head. It brought out of the gloom a wide, blunt jaw, high cheekbones, brush-stiff yellow hair. The broad nose was squashed flat. The lips were thick, puffy—the ears, shapeless gristle. The eyes...
Peering from behind the sales counter, Doc Turner saw that the eyes were not sightless but blurred by tears! And in the columnar throat, left bare by the low neck of a scarlet sweater the man wore under his loose jacket, was revealed the pulse of sobs sternly repressed.
A strong man in tears! A giant crying! To many the incongruity would have been a matter for laughter and mockery. But when Andrew Turner moved out behind the counter, his voice was gentle.
"What's the trouble, Kenny?" he asked. On the muscle-swollen arm the druggist's hand was gnarled, its almost translucent skin corrugated by blue veins. "How can I help you?" Noting the little crowd that had clotted the store's doorway—wide-eyed boys; alien-countenanced, shabby men—Doc exclaimed, "Wait, Kenny. Come in back where they can't hear."
Overtowered by the other's bulk, Turner seemed doubly tiny and feeble. His hair and bushy mustache were white-bleached by the years; his thin, big-nosed face, grey and wrinkled. Yet the youthful giant seemed to draw strength from the old man's touch. He went with him through a curtained doorway into a narrow, shelf-lined room pungent with the acrid odors of tinctures, fluid extracts and medicinal chemicals.
A small boy's shrill, excited cry followed them. "That's him. That's Magraw himself!" And a hoarser voice: "Giva the Tiger hell tonight, Bruis'. I got ten bucks on you!"
To these hero-worshippers who recognized him, but not his distress, the big man was "Bruiser" Magraw. But to Doc Turner he was still Keniat Paliechka, the dirty-faced urchin to whom he had given many a handful of jelly-beans; the sturdy little fellow who, after school, had hawked penny market-bags to the shawled patrons of the pushcarts that lined Morris Street, and had gathered broken wood from the dumps so that his widowed mother might have warmth for her long nights of weary sewing.
"All right now, son," Doc murmured. "What is it?"
Tautness still gripped the man. His lips, thickened by many blows, moved. "It's Mom," he husked. "She's gone!"
Sara Paliechka need sew no longer, but she had refused to leave her cronies of the slum. She accepted from her son's fistic earnings only enough for those luxuries of luxuries—a flat with steam-heat and running hot water; a worker-by-the-day to relieve her of the more laborious tasks of housekeeping.
Doc stirred. "What do you mean—gone?" he asked.
"She went to Mass this morning—and ain't come back."
"Is that all?" Turner laughed easily. "She's probably visiting with one of her friends, or in the park, baking her old bones in the sun."
"No." The other shook his head. "I wrote her Mike was letting me come to see her today—for the last time before the fight. She ain't seen me but twice since I went to training camp. She'd sure been home waiting for me—unless she couldn't help herself."
"You think she's met with an accident?"
"I know what she's met up with." The words were without intonation. "And it ain't any accident. Look." Paliechka's great fist held something. "This was on the table in the kitchen, waiting for me." The banana-like fingers uncurled. Doc saw that, crushed in them, was an oblong of cheap, greyish paper such as may be bought in a thousand stationery stores for three cents.
The pharmacist spread it smooth on the white-scrubbed top of the long compounding table. The message was in pencil, crudely printed and read:
Dive if you want her back. Win or squeal—and you won't see her again.
The corners of Doc's mouth twitched. "Plain enough," he remarked softly. "What are you going to do? That's the question..."
PALIECHKA picked up the note, started tearing it into tiny
shreds. He did this slowly, lingeringly, but there was a cold,
abysmal ferocity in the way he did it, as if it were not paper
but some tangible enemy. "I ain't never throwed a fight, yet,
Doc." For all his giant size there was something of the little
boy about Keniat Paliechka—an urchin caught in a dilemma
too difficult for him to solve. "I busted the jaw of my first
manager when he propositioned me to take a dive. That was on
account of her. Now, on account of her, I got to—dive."
"Listen, my boy..." The old man's face was bleak. "You heard Giuseppe Palumbo say that he's betting on you. Everyone from around here has—ten dollars, fifteen, perhaps only five or one. But it's not money they've risked on you. It's shoes for their children, warm clothes—in many cases even next week's food. They don't bet on fights, Kenny, but they're betting on you. On the boy who grew up among them, on their own. It's the only way they can show their loyalty to you."
"I know," Paliechka groaned. "That's why I came here. I want you to get them to copper their dough."
"They can't do that, Kenny," Doc said. "You ought to know that they haven't any money to bet against you. They've already gambled that you will win—all that they could scrape together. More, son, than they can afford to lose."
"They'll have to lose it, then, Doc. They—"
"Think of the youngsters, Kenny," Doc went on. "The boys... You—why, you're almost a god to them. They walk like you. They talk like you. And if they know you've gone crooked—they'll go crooked too."
"They'll know." The big fellow's hand jerked, and flakes of paper sprayed from it, drifted to the floor like grey snow. "Kids always know them things. I am thinking of them, Doc. And I'm thinking of Mike Larron too, my manager. He's old now. I'm his last chance at the big money. He's worked and slaved like a dog till tonight. I'm fighting the last guy between me and the champeen."
The tears had cleared from Keniat Paliechka's eyes, no longer hiding the little lights that crawled in their brown depths. "Mike's shot his whole wad on me. If I lose, he's a bum—washed up. I'd cut my own throat before I'd do that to him." His fingers took hold of the counter edge and flattened, and Turner almost thought he could see the wood crush in that terrible grip. "I'd cut my throat..."
"Then you're going to fight to win!" Doc exclaimed, elation in his tone. "Good boy!"
"She's my Mom, Doc," the fighter continued. "She's my old Mom and Bart Gaxter's mugs have got hold of her." Abruptly Turner swung from him, as if unable longer to endure the big man's agony. Doc twitched at the hem of the doorway's curtain. "That figures bigger with me than what's going to happen to Mike Larron and the kids, and all the whole rest of Morris Street."
An odd muscle tremor showed in Doc Turner's seamed cheek. "Yes," he said loudly. "She's your mother, Magraw, and that's all that should count for you. You have to get her back all right, safe and unharmed." A queer tenseness had gripped the old man. He seemed like an aged leopard about to pounce on his prey. "Go back to your training quarters. Say nothing to anyone. Act as if nothing were wrong. Lose your fight. Only, Bruiser, don't let it look raw. Fight—really fight as if you mean to win—until the last round, the fifteenth. Then be knocked out—if you have to." There was the slightest stress on that last phrase, "Understand?"
"Yeah." Paliechka's dull-toned response held a note of surprise at Doc's amazing change of front. "I get it." Perhaps he had thought to gain courage for defiance from the old man. Certainly he had not expected this sudden counsel of surrender. "I dive in the fifteenth."
"But not till then." Doc swung back to him, and it was as if there was a smouldering fire beneath the aged pharmacist's ash-grey skin. "Now, look. I'm going to let you out through this side door back here, so you can dodge that crowd." He went to the seldom used exit to Hogbund Lane, unbolted it.
The big fellow lurched out.
DOC refastened the door, went through the curtain to the front
of the store. As he emerged, there was a flurry in the little
knot of Bruiser Magraw's idolators still gathered in the front
doorway.
"You just lost a customer, Doc," someone called in. "Guy got tired waiting for you to come out."
Doc Turner shrugged as he moved along behind the sales counter to his cash register. "He couldn't have wanted anything important, or he'd waited." On the ledge over the register's drawer, hidden from those in the doorway, lay a small rectangular box. "By the way, fellows, it's no use waiting around for Bruiser Magraw." The box resembled those Doc used for prescription powders. But this box was not his, and it had not been there when Keniat Paliechka had entered. "I let him out the side door."
Murmurs of disappointment came from the little crowd as it broke up.
The druggist's acid-stained fingers trembled a bit as they picked up the box. Doc had watched through the slit between curtain and frame, and seen the ferret-faced, shabby little man reach over the counter and leave it. It was for this eavesdropper's benefit that Doc had made that final, startling speech to Keniat Paliechka.
One word was penciled on the box lid—Magraw. Doc removed the lid. Two white spots pitted the skin on either side the wings of his big nose...
The box contained a pendant of old gold, intricately carved. A thing of beauty fashioned centuries ago, on the other side of the world. Andrew Turner remembered this ancient earring, and its mate. He remembered the glow in Sara Paliechka's eyes as she spoke of them, in her broken English. "I never take them from my ear. They belong to Polander queen, long time ago. If I had a daughter, she would get them when I die. I no have daughter, so they be buried with me. Never, never will they come out of my ear."
Now here was one pendant—and on the wire loop that had pierced her lobe was drying blood and an almost microscopic shred of something that was not blood...
On the bottom of the box was pencil-printed a message:
She yowled when we jerked this loose, Bruiser. She'll yowl worse if you win tonight.
The missive had been intended for Sara Paliechka's son, Keniat. The man entrusted with its delivery had decided there was no need for this—after hearing Doc's words. But he had left it here to let Doc know how wise had been his advice to the fighter—and to warn him not to change it.
"Hey, Doc!" a voice called from the doorway. A barrel-chested, carrot-topped youth, in the grease-smeared overalls of a garage mechanic, stamped in. "What's this I hear about Bruiser Magraw being here?"
Turner looked up. "Hello, Jack. Yes, he was here."
"That's funny." Puzzlement showed on his freckled countenance. "Some of the boys talked to Mike Larron at the weighing-in yesterday. They wanted to find out what hotel Kenny was going to be stopping at so they could sort of parade with him to the Bowl. But Mike said they were going to come right in from training-camp to the fight—and wouldn't get there till the first prelim started."
"I read that same statement in the newspapers, Jack. Nevertheless, Paliechka came into town this morning—to see his mother."
"Oh! So that's it!" Jack Ransom nodded. "The old lady never went to one of his fights, yet—but he's always seen her on the day, to get her blessing. I was wondering how come he was leaving that out, this time. Now I see he wasn't. Fox Larron was just being cagy. The Tiger's backed by about the dirtiest bunch of racketeers in the country. Mike didn't want them pulling any tricks, so he and Bruiser slipped into town without anybody knowing."
"Jack," Doc Turner said, "somebody knew Kenny wasn't omitting his visit to his mother today—and has taken advantage of that fact."
Ransom's grin vanished. "What's been pulled off, Doc?" He had been Doc Turner's good right hand in dozens of battles against the wolves who prey on the helpless poor—and knew the meaning of that icy blueness in the old man's eyes. "Have we got a job?"
"We have a job, son." The druggist's grimness matched the younger man's. "Listen..."
"The dogs!" Jack Ransom muttered when Turner had finished. "Bart Gaxter's gang have pulled some lousy stunts, but this is the worst. No wonder the odds on Kenny are dropping. I'll bet there's big money going down on the Tiger in every poolroom in the country! But I don't get your play, Doc. I don't get it at all. Why didn't you grab the weasel that left that box and make him talk? He couldn't have gotten away. The boys hanging around the door would have stopped him, if you'd yelled."
"Of course they would have—and I should have gained nothing." Doc shook his head. "As soon as I saw how brazenly the fellow was acting, I concluded that he knew nothing about the place where they are keeping Kenny's mother. Whoever sent him to deliver this box was not afraid of his being caught."
Ransom scowled. "Doc, you're not licked, are you? You're not going to let Morris Street be cleaned out? You're not going to let Baxter get away with this?"
"No, Jack." The aged pharmacist smiled. Jack Ransom could have told Sara Paliechka's kidnappers that when Andrew Turner smiled like that, it promised swift reprisal. "I'm not letting these beasts get away with it. Not if I can help it."
The red-headed youth exclaimed, "Then let's get busy."
"No hurry, son," Doc Turner said quietly. "The first preliminary at the Bowl doesn't start until eight-thirty."
A FIERCE surf of hoarse-voiced humans beat against the high,
pale walls of Jeffries Bowl, Temple of Fistiana. Raucous cars,
rattling "El" trains, jammed buses, swelled the eager mob; and
sweating, swearing policemen fought to split that human stream
into orderly rivulets as it flowed toward the great
amphitheatre.
Within the vast arena, hard white light cut a raised, rope-fenced square platform out of the clattering darkness. In the diagonally opposite corners, little knots of sweatered men clustered about two white-skinned, slender youths whose faces, unmarked as yet by the hard trade to which they aspired, were drawn and haggard. A future champion might be sprawled on one of these stools, but none of the gathering crowd spared them a glance. None was interested in futures. It would be an hour and a half yet before the main event—the meeting of a blond, tall giant and a swarthy, prowling, cruel-fisted hunter from the west.
In the north, east and southern walls of the stadium, yawning portals swallowed the clamorous streams of fans. A burly sentry guarded a small door in the western wall, and through this but few were being permitted to enter—contestants and their handlers, poker-faced representatives of the press; certain portly, pink-faced gentlemen whose right to the privilege was shadowy but somehow unquestioned.
A little man, white-haired, bushy-mustached, shabbily dressed, diffidently approached this gate. The guard's steely arm shot out to bar his entrance.
"Where d'you think you're going?" the sentinel demanded.
Andrew Turner peered at him. "Has Mr. Larron arrived yet?"
"Just went in," said the guard. "What's that to you?"
"I wish to speak with him."
"You do, huh?" Thick lips parted in a yellow-fanged grin. "Now ain't that nice? I guess he'll be sobbing himself to sleep tonight when he finds out I wouldn't let you—"
"You will send this note in to him." The old man's tone was low, almost mild, yet a certain directness in it brought the guard's heavy-lidded eyes open wide. "At once." Turner held out a small envelope, and the guard took it.
"Okay," he growled, and heard himself add, to his own astonishment, a grudging "sir." He turned. "Hey, Jim, take this to Mike Larron."
A wizened individual appeared, no bigger than a boy in his teens, but with the countenance of a man who had lived too long, seen too much. He clawed the envelope away from the guard, vanished. Five minutes later he was back, mumbling toothlessly, "Mike says I should bring him in."
DOC followed his shuffling guide through board-walled, dim-lit
corridors that echoed with hoarse shouts and reeked with the
spicy tang of wintergreen and camphor. Slapping sounds came from
an open door, and Doc glimpsed a naked man stretched face down on
a wooden table, a sweatered trainer pummeling him unmercifully. A
flight of stairs rose to another passage. Men were going back and
forth along this, and there was a thunder of trampling feet
overhead.
The guide pointed to a door, mumbled, "In there," and shambled off into the shadows.
Doc Turner opened the door, went in. The room had walls of unpainted plaster. Its one window was tiny, high up. The room was bare, the only furnishings a long table and two cane chairs. Near the table stood a beetle-browed, squat man with sparse, grizzled hair and a thin, tight mouth.
He held Doc's little envelope, torn open. He looked up from the card it had contained, his face expressionless. "I'm Larron," he rumbled. "What was you getting at on this card?"
"Just what I said." Doc nodded. "I know how to find Sara Paliechka."
"So what if you do?" Larron put the card and envelope into a pocket of his checked vest, carefully. "What's it to me?"
"The difference between your fighter's winning and losing tonight," Doc said. "She's in the hands of people who've told Magraw that they'll kill her, if he doesn't throw the fight to Tiger Bayne. I've come to you instead of the police. If the matter becomes public, the fight will be called off. Kenny's chance at the championship will be gone. With the help of a couple of good men, I can rescue her. I'll get her here before the big fight is over. Can you find two men for me?"
"How do you know where the old dame is?" Larron stared intently. "Who squealed to you?"
Turner shook his head. "I would be breaking my solemn oath if I told you that. Are you going to help me, or shall I go to the police?"
The manager's eyes slitted. "You look like you're about ready to fall apart," he murmured. "But Kenny's told me about you. He says you're hell on wheels when you get started. I wouldn't know about that. But I do know when a man's lying, and I don't think you are."
"I'm not lying." The old pharmacist's smile was weary and without humor.
"Why don't you give me the dope and step out—let me handle it?" Larron said. "Black Bart Gaxter's a tough egg. If he finds out you've upset his apple cart he won't stop till he gets even. He might blow your drugstore to splinters."
Doc shrugged. "I've lived too many years to be frightened anymore. You're wasting time. What's your answer?"
A pulse throbbed in Larron's left temple. "Have it your own way. Wait here a minute." He came around from behind the table, went out into the hall.
Doc followed as far as the entrance to the little room, watched Larron go down the corridor to another door—open it and disappear. A babble of voices reached the druggist. Larron came out again, two husky, ugly-looking men with him. The trio stood whispering for a moment, then came toward Andrew Turner.
"These boys are Hen Fowler and Tug Corbin," Larron said. "They're pretty handy with their fists, but they're better with guns. They've kept Black Bart's mob clear of our camp, and they're the guys for the job you've got."
"Thank you," Doc said. "One thing more. I'll need a car."
"You can use mine," Larron said quickly. "Here's the key."
The parking garage was near enough to the Bowl to be within hearing of its crowd-roar. The car was a four-door sedan, painted black. Fowler took the driver's seat, and Turner got in alongside of him. Corbin tipped the mechanic who'd taken them to it, then lumberingly got in the back.
"Where to?" Fowler asked.
"Start west along Sedgecomb Avenue," the old man instructed. "Turn north at Harley Street. When we get out of traffic, I'll tell you the rest."
Sedgecomb Avenue was almost choked with arriving cars. The sedan crept till it turned into Harley Street. This was a one-way route away from the arena zone and was nearly empty now. There was only one other car on it, in fact—a battered flivver that, evidently having deposited its passengers, was just starting away from the curb at the corner. Fowler speeded up to get ahead of this.
"All right, mister," he growled. "Spill. Where do we go from here?"
Doc leaned forward, peering through the windshield. "Isn't that a police squad-car, ahead there at the corner of the Boulevard?"
"Yeah. Why?"
"Because I've changed my mind." There was a quaver of fear in the druggist's voice. "Stop there, and I'll get the police to help rescue Sara."
"The hell you will," Fowler grunted. "You said we was going to do it without ringing the cops in. That's the way it will be."
"No." Doc caught at the man's arm with trembling fingers. "Good Lord, no." His tones thinned, his eyes widened with panic. "Larron told me Bart Gaxter is mixed up in this thing, and now I'm frightened. Stop the car. I—"
"Shut that squealing," Tug Corbin ordered from behind. Something hard thudded into Turner's spine. "Shut it." It was a revolver muzzle that prodded Doc. "Where's the old gal? Come on. Give."
"I—I won't," Doc chattered. "I won't tell you. I'm afraid of those thugs. They'll kill us all, and I don't want to die. I won't take you there."
"Then we'll take you there, smart guy." Fowler chuckled. "We'll take you there, and then we'll get out of you what we really want to know—who squealed to you. Get it?"
Doc sank back in his seat, cowering. "I—I get it," he whispered. "This time I talked too much—too soon..."
THE crowd outside the Bowl was dwindling. Within, the immense
slanting saucer of seats showed few empty spaces. The first
preliminary was over, the second entering the sixth round of the
scheduled ten. Just beneath the edge of the platform, a radio
engineer was making some final adjustments to a microphone. Lloyd
Hibbens, American Broadcasting Company's ace sports announcer,
scribbled some last minute local-color notes and spoke to his
assistant, Jimmy Cox.
"Wasn't for the company rule against it," he said, "I'd have a grand on the Bruiser's nose."
"You'd be a sucker," was the answer. "This one's fixed like all the others Black Bart mixed in."
"The hell it is," Hibbens protested. "No one can get to either Magraw or Mike Larron. Those two are all wool and a yard wide."
"Says you."
"Says me."
AN "El" train rumbled over the roof of the sedan
in which Doc Turner rode, with death beside him. This was Morris
Street, and the pushcarts lined the familiar curbs, their wares
vivid orange and scarlet and green in the brilliant glare of
electric bulbs. A shifting, alien throng filled the sidewalks,
but for once the shawled housewives, the shabbily clothed
laborers, were not chaffering with the hucksters. They were
clotted in front of certain stores—a pawnshop, a hardware
emporium—in whose doorways hung loudspeakers.
A tremendous sizzling reached Doc's ears, and then a gargantuan voice. "This is Lloyd Hibbens of ABC, folks, all set to bring you the Magraw-Bayne set-to, by courtesy of Emperor Shoes. In five minutes the boys will be coming into the ring, and the battle of the year will begin. Jeffries Bowl is filled with as glamorous a..."
The voice faded as the sedan turned a corner, went down a long slope toward the river. Drab-fronted tenements slid by, and then the car was turning again into a wide, cobbled thoroughfare that by day was tumultuous with backfiring trucks and swearing men but now was a dark, deserted waste. The black fronts of river piers walled it on the right, the high, blind loom of warehouses on the left.
Between two of the latter, a narrow alley-mouth yawned blackly. Hen Fowler veered the car to the curb, braked in front of this. He turned to Doc, and now there was also a gun in his hand. "All right, mister wise guy," he said. "This is where we get off."
Corbin opened the door beside the old pharmacist. Doc stepped stiffly to the pavement. The two thugs closed in on either side of him, marched him into the alley. Here was the slickness of moisture underfoot, a stench of jute bags, cheese and unripe fruit. Against his side was the unrelenting pressure of Hen Fowler's weapon. The little procession stopped. Corbin's form was a black splotch against the blackness of the warehouse wall. Doc heard a series of sharp rappings, as of a coin on wood. There came the creaking of rusty hinges.
The door thudded shut behind Doc in the impenetrable darkness. Bruising fingers grabbed his wrist. He was stumbling down interminable wooden steps.
Light dazzled the old man, and then his vision cleared. He was in a low-roofed, stone-walled space. A vista of moisture-filmed, rusted iron pillars marched away from him into the gloom. A little electric battery candle was held by the thick-bodied, almost bald individual who had let them in. He put the light down on a backless stool that stood against one of the pillars, and now Doc saw where the tiny whimpering came from.
It seemed like a bundle of rags on the floor... then he made out the tiny, deeply seamed face, the straggly hair; and the cloth bandage that gagged Sara Paliechka.
"All right, mister," Hen Fowler grunted. "Now come across." Hands took hold of Doc's upper arms—powerful hands gripping so hard they numbed. "Who fingered this hideaway to you?"
"You don't expect me to tell you that?"
"You'll talk," the other responded, grimly. "Sit him down, Tug," he commanded, and Doc felt himself dragged back, pounded down on the chair, from which the third man had plucked the light. "Take off his shoes and stockings, Baldy."
Baldy knelt, put his light down on the floor, and roughly bared Turner's left foot. Corbin passed a rope around the old druggist's chest, dragged him against the pillar, bound him to it. Fowler holstered his gun beneath his left armpit and fumbled a book of paper matches out of his pocket.
The corner of his mouth twitched. "You can yell your head off down in this cellar and nobody will hear you. The only yell that'll do you any good will be the name of the rat that squealed to you." He was tearing the matches out of the book, one by one. "Hold his foot up, Baldy."
The bald-headed thug jerked Turner's leg up and out, so that Fowler could reach it without stooping. The latter thrust the untipped ends of the paper matches under each of Doc's toenails, producing a grimly decorative effect. "You'll save yourself a lot, if you give it up now," Fowler said, softly. "How about it?"
"No," Doc Turner answered.
Fowler's hand went into his jacket pocket again, came out with a cigarette. He put this between his lips, struck one of the remaining matches and lit his cigarette, leisurely. He did not flick the match out.
"You better change your mind," he muttered.
"No."
Fowler touched the flame to the tip of the match that stuck out from under Doc's big toe-nail. This flared, started burning down to the living flesh that held it...
THE clang of a bell, a hundred times magnified, echoed in
Morris Street. "And there's the end of the third round," Lloyd
Hibbens' giant voice thundered. "Jimmy Cox will give you a resumé
of it while I rest. Come in, Jimmy!"
"The Bruiser still had all the best of it in this round," a new voice roared. "He's certainly shown himself master of the Tiger. But there's something puzzling about the way Magraw's fighting. Always before, he's put his opponent away as quickly as he could. He's had Bayne on the ropes twice—has had at least four openings for that thunderbolt right of his—but let the opportunity go by. He hasn't blasted that dynamite right fist at all. Is there something wrong with it? Or does he miss Mike Larron's shrewd coaching? That's another queer thing. For the first time in one of Magraw's fights, his shrewd manager is missing from his corner. We're wondering... There's the warning signal for the fourth. Remember, folks, Emperor Shoes are the supreme dictators of footwear. Come in, Lloyd..."
DOC TURNER screamed agonizingly, but Tug Corbin
only laughed. Doc's shriek rose to unbearable shrillness. Baldy
blew out the match.
"Ready to talk, now?" Hen Fowler demanded.
Cold sweat dewed the old man's forehead. His white lips writhed. "No," he said.
Fowler struck another match. "There's four more," he warned. "And we won't blow the next one out. Who's the rat?"
"You'll never find out," Doc whispered. "I gave my oath..."
Fowler lit the second of the toe-held splinters. The yellow flame spurted, began to creep down toward the old man's flesh—then Hen Fowler suddenly whirled, grabbing for his gun.
A carrot-headed form had leaped in through the door behind, dived for him, fist flailing. There was a spat of flesh on flesh, and Fowler was crumpling. Now three other forms were leaping on Baldy and Corbin, bearing them to the floor.
Jack Ransom whirled toward Doc, breathing hard. He snatched the burning match from his toe. "Doc," he yelled, heedless of the melee that still raged behind the pillar to which the old man was lashed. "God, Doc, that must have been hell. The way you screamed—"
"I screamed to cover the sound of your picking the lock." Doc smiled. "The flame hadn't quite reached my toe yet. I knew you were following me in your flivver. But who are these boys you brought along to help?"
"A couple of Kenny's old friends." Jack grinned, working at the rope. "I saw them standing out there on Morris Street, and I took them along to help. They won't talk about this, but they'll take care of these birds. Plenty."
"You said it," a hawk-nosed, curly-haired youth answered. "And will we! Quick, take the old lady to the Bowl—and leave these momsers to us!"
"Quick's right." Jack whirled to lift Sara from the floor. "The fight must be half over. We'll have to use Larron's boat."
MEANWHILE, back at the Bowl, weird events were happening...
"What did I tell you?" Jimmy Cox whispered to Lloyd Hibbens. "If this scrap's not fixed, I'm a billy goat." Now he was talking into the microphone. "Seventh round coming up folks—not of a fight, but a puzzle. The Bruiser could have taken the Tiger any time in this last one—like he could have any time since this so-called battle began. But he hasn't. Is he carrying Bayne along to make a return match look good? Is he...? What's the use guessing? This is just one of those things.
"If the state boxing commission doesn't rule both pugs out of the ring after this farce, then we ought to have a new commission."
THE black sedan flashed through the streets toward Jeffries
Bowl, Jack Ransom at its wheel. "I picked you up on Harley
Street, the way you said, and followed you all the way, Doc. They
never spotted me. But I still don't get how you figured it
out."
"What Larron said to you, what the newspapers printed, showed that Mike was keeping very secret the fact that Kenny was to visit his mother this morning." Doc was in the back seat, Sara Paliechka in his arms. "Yet her kidnappers knew he was to be there, left a note on her kitchen table for him. Therefore, Larron had to be mixed up in it. Larron, of course, was betting against Kenny, and set for a final clean-up. It was through Larron that I could find Kenny's mother. By making him think that I knew where she was. He didn't dare have me killed until he found out who supposedly had betrayed him to me. He figured that same traitor would be sure to blackmail him, were I found murdered. That's why he instructed his thugs to go with me to the hideout and wring the information from me there. The trick I played, to get them to show me where it was, wouldn't have succeeded with him."
"Here's the Bowl, Doc. Say, how the devil are we going to get in? We haven't a ticket among the three of us, and the thing was a sellout days ago."
"Drive around to the contestants' entrance," Doc said. "Hurry!"
THE crowd in the arena was going wild.
"A left, a left, a right," Lloyd Hibbens was panting into the microphone. "And another left to the stomach. I'll swear that sank to the wrist. After twelve rounds of slow motion, this is a fight at last. Wow! That one missed by a quarter inch. If it had landed, Bruiser Magraw's goose would have been cooked. Tiger Bayne's come alive at last, folks. He's got the big Bruiser floundering."
BY now Jack Ransom had braked the black sedan, leaped to the
sidewalk, pulled the rear door open and taken Sara Paliechka's
limp body from Doc. The woman's emaciated, flabby-skinned arm
clung to the redhead's shoulder, and she was saying, "Hurry up!
Hurry up!" Doc ran past them up to the gate-tender.
"You here again?" the latter grunted.
"Let us through," the old druggist panted. "Quick. Mike Larron sent me to get the Bruiser's mother. I've got her."
"Mike Larron?" The thick-skulled guard scratched his head. "Well, I dunno."
"It's all right, Dan," a tall, black-haired man said, coming out of the door behind him. "Let them in. I'll front for you."
"Yes, sir."
The man turned to Doc. "I presume that you're anxious to reach the ringside. If you'll come with me, I'll show you the quickest way."
"Thank you." Turner sighed his relief. "I was afraid we'd be too late after all."
The man started trotting through the maze of corridors within, Jack following him, Doc bringing up the rear. There was no one about now, the distance-dulled crowd-roar echoing in empty passages. Their guide abruptly whirled.
"This is as far as you three go," he said. "Get it?" Each of his hands gripped an automatic, and his mouth was a slitted gash in his pallid, evil face. "And it's Bart Gaxter who's telling you that."
The radio announcer was blaring, "The fourteenth round is half over, folks, and the most amazing reversal of form in the history of pugilism continues. Tiger Bayne is making a chopping block of Bruiser Magraw. He's hitting him at will, and hitting him hard. The big blond doesn't seem to know what it's all about, but somehow he's managing to stay on his feet!"
The little group still gaped at those menacing guns. "Bart Gaxter," Jack Ransom was muttering. "Black Bart."
"Himself," Gaxter said, smiling thinly. "The birds I planted in Mike Larron's camp tipped me off to what was going on. I own that garage where Larron's car was parked, if you're interested in how—and knowing how dumb they are, I've had all the gates watched, waiting for you in case of a slip-up. It came off, I see..."
Then suddenly, amazingly, he collapsed, sinking to the ground. The gun-crack seemed to come after that rather than before...
And then Mike Larron was plunging past them, grabbing Jack Ransom's arm. "Black Bart put it over on me till the last," he snapped at Doc. "But after you left, I got worrying over what you'd told me. And when I saw that he wasn't in his seat out there, I decided to watch him instead of the fight. Good thing I did. Hurry, for the love of everything that's holy. There's the bell for the end of the fourteenth..."
BRUISER MAGRAW lurched out of his corner for the fifteenth
round. The fifteenth, at last... The number seemed to dance in
the red haze that was all he could see. The fifteenth... He could
lie down at last.
A blurred shadow moved—somewhere in the scarlet fog. The shadow that had chopped at him since time began. It was getting nearer. It was going to hit him, and he'd fall down and go to sleep. Sleep... "Mom," Kenny Paliechka muttered, "I'm sleepy..." Instinctively he pawed at the shadow, and it hit him... and he let himself fall...
"Kenny!" It shrilled through the roar of thunder, through the voice of someone counting,
"One—Two...
"Three... Four..."
"Kenny, get up!" That was Mom.
"Five... Six... Seven!"
Kenny pulled the edge of his glove across his eyes, wiped the blood away. "Eight!" He saw his mother held high on the shoulders of a red-headed man!
Bruiser Magraw was somehow on his feet, turning to meet that prowling shadow that battered him so wearily, for so long. It was not a shadow now. It was Tiger Bayne!
Magraw met the other fighter—with a pawing glove. Another... Tiger Bayne stopped short, startled for a split-second at this sudden coming-alive of the dummy he'd been pummeling at will. That split-second was too long. The chunk of the blonde giant's right fist was distinct above the manic roar of the crowd. The sodden thud of Tiger Bayne's body, hitting the resin, was equally clear...
They heard that chunk and thud, on Morris Street. The shawled housewives heard it, and so did the shabby men who had bet their meager all on that boy who had grown up in this slum with them. And the youngsters heard it, the urchins to whom Bruiser Magraw was a demigod. The youngsters who walked like him and talked like him... and who would go crooked, or honest—as they knew him to be.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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