Acres of Unrest (16 page)

In the opposite corner, a voice complained: “Why didn’t you hit him, kid? What’re you doing in there?”

“You sap!” gasped Canuck. “I hit him enough. What do you call hitting?”

“Oh, you hit him. But you didn’t set yourself. You got to soak him, Canuck. You’re losing a lot of prestige, letting a tramp like that stick out a whole round with you.”

“He’s busted a rib for me, I think,” groaned Canuck. “He ain’t a man. He’s a bear. He squashed me, I tell you. They ought to disqualify him for that.”

“Disqualify? You think that a disqualification would go down the throats of this gang? They’d fill us all full of lead! No, Canuck…but the first thing you do in the next round…you tear his head off.”

“I’ll kill him!” snarled Canuck.

As the bell clanged, he was off of his stool and across the ring before Soapy had so much as straightened up from his place.

With the might of that long run behind him, with the impetuous sway of 230 pounds of trained and hardened muscle—with the snap and precision of the good boxer, Canuck smashed his fist straight against the point of Soapy’s jaw. The lunging force of the blow toppled the mulatto to the side
against the ropes, snapping his head back across his shoulder.

Soapy was not down, however. He rolled heavily back from the ropes, and Canuck, his mind bewildered because he had failed to knock the other straight through the ropes and among the crowd, met the mulatto with hammer strokes with either hand. He smote his terrible straight-driving left into the pit of Soapy’s bulging midriff. It was as though he had struck an India-rubber cushion with springs beneath it. He hammered his right again to the jaw, but the blow glanced futilely away. He smashed once more with the right for the heart, and he felt as though he had sprained his wrist, beating against a stone wall. Before him there was a smooth globe of head and face, split asunder by the widely grinning lips.

“My, ain’t you in a hurry, mister,” remarked Soapy as he smote at the phantom in haste.

It was a descending punch. It missed the jaw for which it was intended—missed by a foot—but it grazed along the ribs of Canuck, and he felt as though he had been scraped along a sharp reef of stone. He drew back, gasping, dazzled by this miracle.

“Kill him, now that you got him started, Canuck!” shrieked the familiar voice of his manager.

But Canuck knew better than that.

The whole crowd was seething with a terrible joy in this carnage. It looked to them as though the mulatto were being torn to shreds. But, as the yellow face rolled toward Canuck, the champion chattered from the side of his mouth to the referee: “You better stop this. I don’t want to kill him. I can’t afford to pay funeral expenses.”

The withered face of the referee puckered with interest. But then he shook his head. “You ain’t hurt him yet, Canuck.”

“I could cut him to ribbons. He ain’t got a guard. Look at this.” He stepped in and struck twice suddenly across the flailing hands of Soapy. The blows landed on either side of Soapy’s head. But his forward progress was not halted. He rolled closer, and Canuck braced himself to block the driving punch.

It smashed through his erected guard, flinging away his right forearm. It dashed the back of his left glove glancing against his jaw. A thoroughly well-blocked blow, surely, and yet the head of Canuck rang, and he was shaken to his feet, while he heard the voice of the referee, drawling: “I dunno that I can stop the fight while he’s still coming after you, Canuck.”

There was no more blocking of punches, after that. The thing to do, obviously, was to avoid the rushes of the mulatto by lightness of foot, and that was what Canuck intended to do. He sped about the ring with wonderful lightness, striking out when an opening offered.

But suddenly here was the mulatto standing still in the center of the ring. “You stand up and fight, you sneaking, low-down skunk. This ain’t no foot race. It’s a fight.”

That, after the battering that Soapy had been taking, brought a roar of sympathetic delight from the crowd. They began to look closer and they saw, as the bell
clanged
and the men went to their corners, that the face of Soapy was apparently unmarked. In spite of the dreadful punishment he had taken, he was still without a vital injury. And he was actually grinning.

Now he sat on his stool, and, waving his eager handlers away, he leaned over the ropes to ask: “Ain’t there none of you gentlemen that can make that sucker stand up and fight? Speaking personal, I sure want to give you your money’s worth.”

It brought a shout of approval from them. And when they stared up into that shining, yellow face they saw that this was not meant for waggery.

A stern-faced gentleman raised a handful of banknotes. “I got five hundred dollars, boys, against any man’s hundred that the yellow boy lasts out the four rounds!”

Soapy stood up with a roar. “Look here, white man, d’you think that these folks is foolish? Don’t they know that I’m gonna kill Mister Canuck the minute that he stands still?”

The bell
clanged
in an uproar of laughter and cheering. And Canuck rose with no undue haste from his stool.

“My arms are numb to the shoulders,” he told his manager. “I soaked him with everything that I had when I first went after him that round. And it didn’t matter. My fists just bounce off of him. What’m I gonna do? What’m I gonna do?”

The manager growled through his set teeth: “If only the newspapers don’t get hold of this! Looks like your wrists are made of mush. Looks like you was only playing with him. Well, keep away from him. You keep away and pepper him from a distance.”

It was all that Canuck could do. He went back into the third round and danced until his knees sagged with weariness. For, after all, there was hardly fifteen pounds less bulk for him to carry than Soapy trundled around the ring. And with the passage of every moment Soapy was growing more active. The
meal that he had stowed away had settled now. He felt lighter and more at ease, and he was growing momently more accustomed to a setting with which the other had been familiar for so long. He was faster afoot, now, and twice as fast with his hands. He followed with half punches, making easy play, his head up, yellow fire in his eyes, as he skipped forward, waiting for a chance to strike. And the game was still sledge-hammer against feather, except that there was less wind to buoy the feather from moment to moment.

Luck, however, had something to do with the matter before the end. Canuck, ducking out of the way of an overarm swing, slipped a little, and the blow glanced from the top of his head. It was enough to make his knees spring beneath him. He staggered back until his shoulders struck the ropes and he recoiled. The recoil threw him out of the way of flying destruction.

He wheeled to strike again. The lurching, low-built body of the mulatto glided in under his punch, and a lifting blow struck Canuck on the breast. It lightened his feet and hurled him back. He strove to regain his balance, but it could not be managed. Canuck staggered, reeled, and fell headlong against the lower rope on the farther side of the ring. As he sat up, dizzy and sick, he heard the deafening roar of the crowd.

He knew what that sound meant. Always, before this, he had heard it as he was beating an opponent into submission, but now it was, for him, like an avenging roar of the sea, and the heart of Canuck sickened and grew weak within his breast.

Then came the mercy of the bell,
clanging
out like silver music to his ear.

He dragged himself to his feet. And here was his manager at his side, drawing his arm across his shoulders and helping him to his corner.

“Kid, what happened?”

“Shut up. Don’t ask me. He shot me with a cannon ball. It wasn’t no fist. What a man he is!”

Canuck sank with a gasp on his stool and heard a voice barking from the side and beneath him: “Five hundred says that the Negro knocks out Canuck in the next round. Who takes that? Or a thousand, if you want it.”

“What odds do you offer, Jerry?”

“Two to one…”

Canunk closed his eyes. Suddenly he seized with a great nostalgia for the deep glooms and the cool silences of the Northern woods. Let others climb the flaming ladder of ambition. But only to be freed from danger and from pain.

So thought Canuck, and then came the crisp voice of his manager: “Kid, you’re done if you don’t duck out of this. You got to foul him. Understand?”

To the desperate mind of Canuck, the clang of the bell seemed a solution. His wind was more than half exhausted. There was a telltale tremor in his knees. And along the ribs and in the back of his neck there was an ache and a numbness from the shock of the glancing blows that Soapy had dealt him. What would happen if one of those terrible strokes landed, full and fair, upon head or body? He thought of crushed bones and shrank with a shudder. Then he saw the yellow face of the mulatto coming toward him, grinning and eager.

“You came along, white man. We’re gonna have a good time, this here dance. Will you stand up and fight? Or do I have to keep right along playing tag with you?”

And he launched a glistening, flashing, terrible length of arm at him. The torn edge of the glove flicked and cut the lip of Canuck as he flinched backward. Canuck struck with both hands at the wide-open target in front of him, but if his might had been useless when his strength was still fresh upon him and when his confidence was like strongest steel, what was it now—now that his self-belief was so dreadfully diminished?

Two hundred and fifty pounds of monstrous humanity shook with terrible laughter as Soapy
mocked this effort and sprang at Canuck with a renewed energy.

There was no weariness in this inhuman creature. He thrived upon blows. They were like the breath of life to his nostrils. And Canuck was barely able to spring back out of the way of lunging danger.

“Ten to one!” a voice was bellowing above the tumult of the throng. “Ten to one on the Negro!”

And another voice: “Ten to one on Soapy!”

Who had learned that name?

Soapy himself heard, and his battle frenzy left him long enough to allow him to turn his head and scan the throng. Who knew his name in that crowd? That knowledge meant danger to himself and double danger to his master. If there was someone there who recognized him, that same man would be most apt to know Mike Jarvin. And recognition would probably spell disaster.

It flashed upon the mind of Soapy that, after all, it would have been far more discreet in him if he had obeyed the instructions of Mike and had remained in charge of the horses—waiting for a crisis in the evening’s affairs. Now—who could tell what might happen?

These thoughts raced through his mind and then were gone. There remained before him only the knowledge that he had chosen pleasure first. So Soapy turned to the joyful duty, forgetting consequences and Mike Jarvin.

Already there was a babel of voices from curious questioners around the ring as Soapy chased his flying foe back and forth.

“Who knows the Negro? Who is he?”

“Soapy. Old Mike Jarvin’s trained man-killer.”

“Jarvin’s?”

“Yes.”

“The devil!”

“That’s what he is.”

“Where’s Jarvin now?”

“I dunno.”

“Stop betting, boys. If this Negro belongs to Jarvin, it means that the fight will go the way that he wants it to go.”

“Stop betting? I’ve stuck up a hundred and fifty already.”

“A hundred and fifty? You lucky dog, I’ve backed the mulatto for twelve hundred. We’ll kill Jarvin and the coon, too, if he don’t polish off Canuck.”

To all of this chatter Soapy was deaf. He had fixed his mind too ardently upon the work that was before him. He starred a swing—and he saw Canuck, unhit, drop to one knee—it would be a foul to strike him now, and Soapy strove to check his blow. It landed only softly on the side of Canuck’s head—but instantly he collapsed along the floor of the ring.

Beside the ropes sprang up a frantic figure, and a clarion voice rang in the ears of the referee: “Foul, Mister Referee! Foul! Foul!”

“Curse the foul!” shouted a tall cattleman near the ring. “Is Canuck quitting? I’m gonna see fair play here! Get up, you skunk!”

The eye of Canuck, rolling to the side, saw the flash of a long-barreled revolver. It brought him scrambling to his feet, and yet there he stood, staggering as though badly hurt by the last punch.

“Look here, boy,” the referee was saying, shaking his finger in the face of Soapy, “one more trick like that, and you’re done, you understand? Now you go in and finish this fight fair…and polish him
off if you can. Don’t you get foolish and excited…even if Mike Jarvin has told you which side he’s bet on.”

The referee knew that name, then? But Soapy, staring at him, hardly knew what had been said. His eyes were glaring over the shoulder of the official and at the unsteady figure of the other fighter.

When he was loosed, he charged like a maddened bull. He missed Canuck with a first punch. But the second, a roundabout left, grazed the forehead of Canuck and flung him flat on his back with a resounding smack of his shoulders against the canvas.

The screech of the crowd pronounced this the final stroke. But Soapy prayed that his foe might rise to be struck Once more—a little—only a little more solidly.

That prayer was to be answered. Canuck was drawing slowly together, bunching himself, raising his knees.

“Five!” counted the referee, and Canuck drew into a close bunch.

Poor Canuck rolled over and strove to push himself up on hands and knees. But his whole body trembled—not with pain or weakness, but with fear. He dreaded that waiting hand of destruction that the mulatto had poised in the air.

“Seven!”

And now the sharp voice of the manager yelled across the ring: “Are you crazy, Canuck? Is this the end of you and your big money?”

“Eight!”

He rose suddenly to his feet and, in a nervous frenzy, drove both hands rapidly into the face of Soapy. But he could not beat back that machinelike
brute. And in despair he resolved upon the last and the lowest expedient of the prize fighter, he hit low and foul.

The mulatto, with a snarl, dropped into a deep crouch.

The referee cried: “Are you hurt, Soapy? D’you claim a foul?”

“Claim a foul? No…I’ll kill him!” cried Soapy, and he leaped at Canuck.

The hoarse screech of the crowd was like the very voice of Soapy himself as he flung himself at the other.

Canuck’s last cunning deserted him. He struck out blindly, his blows recoiling from the padded body of the mulatto.

Then two great hands seized big Canuck. Through the masking canvas of the gloves he could feel the bony fingers grip his flesh. He strove to struggle free, for there was a paralyzing power in the hands of the other. Where his clutch closed, it turned the body of Canuck numb.

Gathered into the grip of Soapy, Canuck found the breath crushed from his body. He thrust feebly back at the yeIlow face of Soapy.

And here was the referee, screeching: “I’ll disqualify you, Soapy! You hear me, you wild fool? I’ll disqualify you…and the crowd’ll kill you if you foul him. Let him go, Soapy!”

He might as well have spoken to a dumb beast. Soapy raised his dreadful right hand, poised it, and struck. The shining body of Canuck turned limp and senseless.

Then in both his giant hands Soapy lifted his enemy and hurled him, face downward, upon the floor. He saw the head of the senseless man
rebound from that terrible shock. And he leaned to pick up Canuck and repeat the dose.

A meager shadow of danger stepped before him and his purpose. It was the referee, shouting: “You’re done, Soapy! You’ve lost this fight on a foul, you fool. Either a fool or a crook. Now keep back from him, or I’ll shoot your head off!” And in his hand, to back up the threat, there was a glittering Colt.

So Soapy drew back, panting with murderous desire, his great hands twitching. He heard a thunder of an angry sea of voices. And a hundred hands were brandished at him.

“Kill the crooked Negro. He threw the fight for Jarvin!”