the kiddies.
And he was leaving it to go out into the night to get meat for his mate
and cubs--not like a modern working-man going to his machine grind, but
in the old, primitive, royal, animal way, by fighting for it.

"I gotter do 'im," he repeated, this time a hint of desperation in his
voice. "If it's a win, it's thirty quid--an' I can pay all that's owin',
with a lump o' money left over. If it's a lose, I get naught--not even
a penny for me to ride home on the tram. The secretary's give all that's
comin' from a loser's end. Good-bye, old woman. I'll come straight home
if it's a win."

"An' I'll be waitin' up," she called to him along the hall.

It was full two miles to the Gayety, and as he walked along he
remembered how in his palmy days--he had once been the heavyweight
champion of New South Wales--he would have ridden in a cab to the fight,
and how, most likely, some heavy backer would have paid for the cab and
ridden with him. There were Tommy Burns and that Yankee nigger, Jack
Johnson--they rode about in motor-cars. And he walked! And, as any man
knew, a hard two miles was not the best preliminary to a fight. He was
an old un, and the world did not wag well with old uns. He was good for
nothing now except navvy work, and his broken nose and swollen ear were
against him even in that. He found himself wishing that he had learned
a trade. It would have been better in the long run. But no one had
told him, and he knew, deep down in his heart, that he would not have
listened if they had. It had been so easy. Big money--sharp, glorious
fights--periods of rest and loafing in between--a following of eager
flatterers, the slaps on the back, the shakes of the hand, the toffs
glad to buy him a drink for the privilege of five minutes' talk--and
the glory of it, the yelling houses, the whirlwind finish, the referee's
"King wins!" and his name in the sporting columns next day.

Those had been times! But he realized now, in his slow, ruminating way,
that it was the old uns he had been putting away. He was Youth, rising;
and they were Age, sinking. No wonder it had been easy--they with their
swollen veins and battered knuckles and weary in the bones of them from
the long battles they had already fought. He remembered the time he put
out old Stowsher Bill, at Rush-Cutters Bay, in the eighteenth round,
and how old Bill had cried afterward in the dressing-room like a baby.
Perhaps old Bill's rent had been overdue. Perhaps he'