ed away into
safety. What the other wanted was a clinch. It was in some way necessary
to the trick. Rivera backed and circled away, yet he knew, sooner or
later, the clinch and the trick would come. Desperately he resolved
to draw it. He made as if to effect the clinch with Danny's next rush.
Instead, at the last instant, just as their bodies should have come
together, Rivera darted nimbly back. And in the same instant Danny's
corner raised a cry of foul. Rivera had fooled them. The referee paused
irresolutely. The decision that trembled on his lips was never uttered,
for a shrill, boy's voice from the gallery piped, "Raw work!"

Danny cursed Rivera openly, and forced him, while Rivera danced away.
Also, Rivera made up his mind to strike no more blows at the body. In
this he threw away half his chance of winning, but he knew if he was to
win at all it was with the outfighting that remained to him. Given the
least opportunity, they would lie a foul on him. Danny threw all caution
to the winds. For two rounds he tore after and into the boy who dared
not meet him at close quarters. Rivera was struck again and again;
he took blows by the dozens to avoid the perilous clinch. During this
supreme final rally of Danny's the audience rose to its feet and went
mad. It did not understand. All it could see was that its favorite was
winning, after all.

"Why don't you fight?" it demanded wrathfully of Rivera.

"You're yellow! You're yellow!" "Open up, you cur! Open up!" "Kill'm,
Danny! Kill 'm!" "You sure got 'm! Kill 'm!"

In all the house, bar none, Rivera was the only cold man. By temperament
and blood he was the hottest-passioned there; but he had gone through
such vastly greater heats that this collective passion of ten thousand
throats, rising surge on surge, was to his brain no more than the velvet
cool of a summer twilight.

Into the seventeenth round Danny carried his rally. Rivera, under a
heavy blow, drooped and sagged. His hands dropped helplessly as he
reeled backward. Danny thought it was his chance. The boy was at, his
mercy. Thus Rivera, feigning, caught him off his guard, lashing out a
clean drive to the mouth. Danny went down. When he arose, Rivera felled
him with a down-chop of the right on neck and jaw. Three times he
repeated this. It was impossible for any referee to call these blows
foul.

"Oh, Bill! Bill!" Kelly pleaded to the referee.

"I can't," that official lamented back. "He won't give me a chanc