In And Out

Excerpt

The Great Unrecognized

Up in the ring, the long-nosed person who had been announced as Kid Horrigan was having things much his own way with the smaller person billed as the Bronx Tornado.

It was the wont of Kid Horrigan to step forward lightly, to rap the Tornado smartly on the bridge of the nose, and thereafter to step back as lightly and wait until the few wild blows had fanned the air and the Tornado had returned to his meaningless and somewhat bewildered crouch.

Thereupon, in almost preoccupied fashion, the Kid stepped forward once more—and when he had done it again and again the performance began to grow monotonous and, down in Box B at the ringside, Johnson Boller yawned aloud.

The yawn finished, he leaned over wearily and addressed Anthony Fry.

"If that little wheeze had the pep of a dead mosquito," said Johnson Boller disgustedly, "he'd take that big stiff when his hands are up like that and slip him an uppercut that would freeze him solid!"

Anthony Fry's intellectual features relaxed in a faint smile.

"He's had several chances, hasn't he?" he mused.

"Several? He's had fifty! He gets three a minute and—well, look at that!"

"Yes, he missed another opportunity then, didn't he?" said Anthony. "Curious!"

Johnson Boller's cigar rolled to the other side of his mouth and he hunched down farther in his chair.

"And nine more rounds of it to go!" he sighed.

Anthony Fry merely smiled more pensively and nodded, removing his nose-glasses and tapping his teeth reflectively—and, among other things, causing the red-faced, partially alcoholized trio behind them in Box B to wonder what he was doing at a prize fight anyway.

As externals go, there was some ground for the wonder. Anthony Fry at forty-five was very tall, very lean in his aristocratic way, and very, very dignified, from the crown of his high-held head to the tips of his toes. In dress he was utterly beyond criticism; in feature he was thin, austere, and impressive. At first glance one might have fancied him a world-famous surgeon or the inscrutable head of the Steel Trust, but the fact of the matter was that Anthony, these fifteen years gone, had inherited Fry's Imperial Liniment, with all that that implied.

It implied a good deal in the way of income, yet even among his friends Anthony did not care to have the liniment phase of his quietly elegant existence dwelt upon too insistently. Not that he regarded the business—run by a perfect manager and rarely visited—as a secret shame exactly, but unquestionably Anthony would have preferred that his late father and his two dead uncles, when starting their original pursuit of wealth, had corraled the world's diamond supply or purchased Manhattan Island at a bargain.

Just now, perhaps, Anthony's more striking features were emphasized by the nearness of Johnson Boller, one of his few really intimate friends.

Johnson Boller's age was just about the same, but there the similarity between them stopped short.

Johnson Boller was plump, one might almost say coarse. Where Anthony walked with slow dignity, Johnson swaggered....