SAM STUBENER ran through his
mail carelessly and rapidly. As became a manager of prize-fighters,
he was accustomed to a various and bizarre correspondence. Every
crank, sport, near sport, and reformer seemed to have ideas to
impart to him. From dire threats, such as pushing in the front of
his face, from rabbit-foot fetishes to lucky horseshoes, from dinky
jerkwater bids to the quarter-of-a-million-dollar offers of
irresponsible nobodies, he knew the whole run of the surprise
portion of his mail.
In his time having received a razor-strop made from the skin of
a lynched Negro, and a finger, withered and sun-dried, cut from the
body of a white man found in Death Valley, he was of the opinion
that never again would the postman bring him anything that could
startle him. But this morning he opened a letter that he read a
second time, put away in his pocket, and took out for a third
reading. It was postmarked from some unheard-of post office in
Siskiyou County, and it ran:
Dear Sam:
You don't know me, except my reputation. You come after my
time, and I've been out of the game a long time. But take it from
me I ain't been asleep. I've followed you, from the time Kal Aufman
knocked you out to your last handling of Nat Belson, and I take it
you're the niftiest thing in the line of managers that ever came
down the pike.
I got a proposition for you. I got the greatest unknown that
ever happened. This ain't con. It's the straight goods. What do you
think of a husky that tips the scales at two hundred and twenty
pounds fighting weight, is twenty-two years old, and can hit a kick
twice as hard as my best ever? That's him, my boy, Young Pat
Glendon, that's the name he'll fight under. I've planned it all
out. Now the best thing you can do is hit the first train and come
up here.
I bred him and trained him. All that I ever had in my head
I've hammered into his. And maybe you won't believe it, but he's
added to it. He's a born fighter. He's a wonder at time and
distance. He just knows to the second and the inch, and he don't
need to think about it at all. His six-inch jolt is more the real
sleep medicine than the full-arm swing of most geezers.
Talk about the hope of the white race. This is him. Come and
take a peep. When you was managing Jeffries you was crazy about
hunting. Come along and I'll give you some real hunting and fishing
that will make your movie picture winnings look like thirty cents.
I'll send Young Pat out with you. I ain't able to get around.
That's why I'm sending for you. I was going to manage him myself.
But it ain't no use. I'm all in and likely to pass out any time. So
get a move on. I want you to manage him. There's a fortune in it
for both of you, but I want to draw up the contract.
Yours truly,
PAT GLENDON
Stubener was puzzled. It seemed, on the face of it, a
joke-the men in the fighting game were notorious jokers-and he
tried to discern the fine hand of Corbett or the big friendly paw
of Fitzsimmons in the screed before him. But if it were genuine, he
knew it was worth looking into. Pat Glendon was before his time,
though, as a cub, he had once seen Old Pat spar at the benefit for
Jack Dempsey. Even then he was called "Old" Pat, and had been out
of the ring for years. He had antedated Sullivan, in the old London
Prize Ring Rules, though his last fading battles had been put up
under the incoming Marquis of Queensbury Rules.
What ring-follower did not know of Pat Glendon?-though few were
alive who had seen him in his prime, and there were not many more
who had seen him at all. Yet his name had come down in the history
of the ring, and no sporting writer's lexicon was complete without
it. His fame was paradoxical. No man was honored higher, and yet he
had never attained championship honors. He had been unfortunate,
and had been known as the unlucky fighter.
Four times he all but won the heavyweight championship, and each
time he had deserved to win it. There was the time on the barge, in
San Francisco Bay, when at the moment he had the champion going, he
snapped his own forearm; and on the island in the Thames, sloshing
about in six inches of rising tide, he broke a leg at a similar
stage in a winning fight; in Texas, too, there was the
never-to-be-forgotten day when the police broke in just as he had
his man going in all certainty. And finally, there was the fight in
the Mechanics' Pavilion in San Francisco, when he was secretly
jobbed from the first by a gun-fighting bad man of a referee backed
by a small syndicate of bettors. Pat Glendon had had no accidents
in that fight, but when he had knocked his man cold with a right to
the jaw and a left to the solar plexus, the referee calmly
disqualified him for fouling. Every ringside witness, every
sporting expert, and the whole sporting world, knew there had been
no foul. Yet, like all fighters, Pat Glendon had agreed to abide by
the decision of the referee. Pat abided, and accepted it as in
keeping with the rest of his bad luck.
This was Pat Glendon. What bothered Stubener was whether or not
Pat had written the letter. He carried it down town with him.
What's become of Pat Glendon? Such was his greeting to all the
sports that morning. Nobody seemed to know. Some thought he must be
dead, but none knew positively. The fight editor of a morning daily
looked up the records and was able to state that his death had not
been noted. It was from Tim Donovan, that he got a clue.
"Sure an' he ain't dead," said Donovan. "How could that be?-a
man of his make that never boozed or blew himself? He made money,
and what's more, he saved it and invested it. Did n't he have three
saloons at the time? An' wasn't he makin' slathers of money with
them when he sold out? Now that I'm thinkin', that was the last
time I laid eyes on him-when he sold them out. 'T was all of twenty
years and more ago. His wife had just died. I met him headin' for
the Ferry. 'Where away, old sport?' says I. 'It's me for the
woods,' says he. 'I've quit. Good-by, Tim, me boy.' And I've never
seen him from that day to this. Of course he ain't dead."
"You say when his wife died-did he have any children?" Stubener
queried.
"One, a little baby. He eas luggin' it in his arms that very
day."
"Was it a boy?"
"How should I be knowin'?"
It was then that Sam Stubener reached a decision, and that night
found him in a Pullman speeding toward the wilds of Northern
California.
