The Fighting Chance

Siward, at his desk, over which the May sunshine streamed, his crutches laid against his chair, sat poring over the piles of papers left there by Beverly Plank some days before with a curt recommendation that he master their contents.

Some of the papers were typewritten, some appeared to be engraved certificates of stock, a few were in Plank's heavy, squat handwriting. There were several packages tied in pink tape, evidently legal papers of some sort; and also a pile of scrap-books containing newspaper clippings to which Siward referred occasionally, or read them at length, resting his thin, fatigued face between two bony hands.

The curious persistence of youth in his features seemed unaccountable in view of the heavy marks imprinted there; but they were marks, not lines; bluish hollows under eyes still young, marred contours of the cheek-bone; a hardness about the hollow temples above which his short, bright hair clustered with all its soft, youthful allure undimmed; and in every movement, every turn of his head, there still remained much of that indefinable attractiveness which had always characterised his race--much of the unconscious charm usually known as breeding.

In men of Mortimer's fibre, dissipation produced coarser symptoms--distended veins, and sagging flesh--where in Siward it seemed to bruise and harden, driving the colour of blood out of him and leaving the pallor of marble, and the bluish shadows of it staining the hollows. Only the eyes had begun to change radically; something in them had been quenched.

That he could never hope to become immune he had learned at last when he had returned, physically wholesome, from his long course of training under the famous Irish specialist on the Hudson. He had expected to be immune, spite of the blunt and forcible language of Mulqueen when he turned him out into the world again: "Ye'll be afther notin'," said Mr. Mulqueen, "that a poonch in the plexis putts a man out; but it don't kill him. That's you! Whin a man mixes it up wid the booze, l'ave him come here an' I'll tache him a thrick. But it's not murther I tache; it's the hook on the jaw that shtops, an' the poonch in the plexis that putts the booze-divil on the bum! L'ave him take the count; he'll niver rise to the chune o' the bell av ye l'ave him lie. But he ain't dead, Misther Sayward; mark that, me son! An' don't ye be afther sayin', 'Th' inimy is down an' out fur good! Pore lad! Sure, I'll shake hands over a dhrink wid him, for he can do me no hurrt anny more!' No, sorr! L'ave him lie, an' l'ave the years av ver life count him out; fur the day you die, he dies, an' not wan shake o' the mixer sooner! G'wan, now, fur the rub-down. Ye've faught yer lasht round, if ye ain't a fool!"