! You can tire him out. He's old and his wind is gone."

The brass rods had been set up in their sockets in the floor and the
space which they outlined in the middle of the room roped off and
carpeted with a square of hard, brown canvas. The man called Boots
Sutton was already in his corner, waiting, and his attitude toward the
whole affair was very patently that of sheer boredom. He barely lifted
his eyes as Young Denny crawled through the ropes at the opposite
corner, behind the officiously fluttering Ogden. This was merely part
of his every day's work; he spent hours each week either instructing
frankly confessed amateurs or discouraging too-confident, would-be
professionals. It was only because of the strangely venomous harshness
with which Hogarty had given him his orders while he was himself
dressing that he vouchsafed Denny even that one glance.

"I want you to get him," Hogarty snarled. "I want you to get him right
from the jump--and get him!--and keep on getting him! Either make him
squeal--make him quit--or beat him to death!"

But if Sutton failed to note the play of those muscles that bunched
and quivered and ran like live things beneath the skin of the boy's
back, when Bobby Ogden threw off the enveloping wrap with an
ostentatious flourish and knelt to lace on his gloves, that disclosure
was not entirely lost upon Hogarty. Watching from the corners of his
eyes, Bobby saw him scowl and chew his lip as his head came forward a
little. And immediately he turned to speak again in a whisper to
Boots, squatting nonchalantly in his corner.

"There's no need, mind, of being careless," he cautioned. "He--he
might have a punch, you know, at that. Some of 'em do--a lucky one
once in a while. Just watch him a trifle--and hand it to him good!"

Sutton nodded and rose to his feet. Watch in hand, Hogarty vaulted the
ropes, and Ogden, with a last whispered admonition, bundled up the
bathrobe and scuttled from the ring.

At that moment Young Denny's bulkily slender body was even more
deceptive. Sutton, even when trained to his finest, would have
outweighed him twenty pounds. Now that margin was nearer thirty, and
added to that, he was inches less in height. He was shorter of neck,
blocky, built close to the ground. And the span of his ankle was
nearly as great as that of Denny's knee.

Comparing them with detail-hungry eyes, Bobby Ogden saw, however, that
from the waist up the boy's clean, swelling body totally shadow