He stopped the punching bag from swinging, stepped back, trailed his right foot, lunged forward and swung on the bag with all his might.
“I don’t know whether it’s right or not,” said the grocer feelingly, “but it looks mighty dangerous. I hope, Jonas, you ain’t going to hit Mr. Notter as hard as that.”
“I may not hit him at all,” the other returned gloomily. “I tell you, Peter, I’ve got to have a sparring partner. Nobody ever trained for a fight without one.”
This expression of a need on the part of Simmons led no later than the following afternoon to a regrettable occurrence. Since no one suitable for the position of sparring partner was to be found in Holtville, Peter Boley decided to sacrifice himself for the good of science. They put on the gloves in the back room of the hardware store. Within the first ten seconds Simmons landed a savage swing on the grocer’s nose, and the blood spurted out as from a miniature fountain.
“Good Lord, Jonas, why did you hit so hard?” groaned Peter, holding his face over a basin of water.
“I got to train, haven’t I?” demanded Simmons. “You should have dodged, Peter. You should have sidestepped and countered with your right. Didn’t I tell you that was the defense for a body swing?”
Thenceforth Simmons was forced to get along without a sparring partner. He spent hours daily with the punching bag, and he also indulged in an exercise which he found explained in detail in a chapter of his book on pugilism. Entering the rear of the hardware store one afternoon, Peter Boley found its proprietor, stripped to the waist, dancing madly around in front of a large mirror, making a bewildering succession of lunges and swings and uppercuts at his reflection in the glass.
Simultaneously he skipped agilely from one foot to the other, jerking his head with wary quickness to the right or left and throwing now one arm, now the other, in a defensive position before his face.
“Good Lord, Jonas, what you tryin’ to do?” exclaimed the grocer, halting in astonishment.
“Shadowboxing,” returned Simmons grimly, without stopping to look around.
Thus the month passed, and the eve of the picnic arrived. On that Friday night, a little after ten o’clock, which was quite late for Holtville, Jone Simmons sat alone on a box in the back room of the hardware store, holding his chin in his hands and gazing broodingly at the darkness in a corner of the room. It had been a strenuous month. He had trained hard and long. Lively tales had run down the main street of the town concerning the past glory of the career of Mr. Notter.
The expression on Jone Simmons’s face as he sat there was not one of pleasurable expectation.
“Amateur champion of Columbus,” he mused finally, aloud.
Another brooding silence followed. After a time he rose to put out the light and go upstairs to join his wife in bed, and as he gave a vicious kick at the box on which he had been sitting he spoke again aloud:
“And Columbus is a mighty big town, too!”
The following day all Holtville was up early. The Annual Picnic of the Merchants’ Association was the great outdoor event of the season, having even become of more importance than the Republican Rally. Wellman’s Grove, a little over two miles from the center of the town, was the spot which had served as the scene of festivals for many years, and thither, in wagon and buggy, by auto and on foot, Holtville and the whole countryside made their way on this bright July morning, having first locked their doors and windows and put out the cats.
The families of Jone Simmons and Peter Boley, which included only themselves and wives, since neither had any children, went together in the grocer’s five-passenger gasoline runabout. Boley had already made the trip half a dozen times since six o’clock that morning, carrying sundry paraphernalia for the entertainments and games of the afternoon.
Among them was a clothesline from his own back yard, which, stretched around four stakes driven in the ground to form a square, was to inclose the “ring” for the unique and principal event of the day. Jone Simmons, as he sat on the driver’s seat beside the grocer, held on his knees a carefully wrapped parcel, which contained two sponges, four towels, a set of boxing gloves and his own costume for the encounter.
The costume had been much admired by the two or three select friends who had been permitted a glimpse of it. It had been made by the fair hands of Mrs. Simmons herself from red silk and white-and-blue muslin, and it was an exact replica of the one worn by Jess Willard in his triumph over Jack Johnson, having been copied from a picture discovered by Slim Pearl, the barber, in an old number of the Police Gazette.
Jone Simmons was the center of all eyes that morning at Wellman’s Grove. Farmers from all over the country, some of whom he had never seen before, sought him out and started conversation. Young country girls, fresh-faced and laughing as they strolled past in groups, would glance at him with shyly interested eyes, giving Jone a curiously pleasurable thrill that he had not experienced for years.
As the sun reached the top of the heavens and the grove filled with its hundreds of pleasure seekers, parties were formed to make excursions down the little river, shady and sparkling, that wound its way between grassy banks at one end of the grove, and here and there a group of young men and girls would start some country game.
Jone was surprised out of speech when one such group broke up at his approach and ran to ask him to join the fun in “drop the handkerchief.” It was their tribute to a fighting man.
Among the men there was only one topic of conversation. Politics and crops were put aside for once to discuss the great event of the afternoon, and more often than not the discussions warmed into arguments. Slim Pearl, the barber, having witnessed several professional prize fights in Cincinnati, suddenly assumed a new importance, being called upon to settle endless disputes on some nice point or other of the technicalities of pugilism. As far as the outcome of the match was concerned, opinion was pretty much one way; nearly everybody favored the chances of Simmons as against the newcomer from Columbus, and there was very little betting.
It was well toward noon before Simmons caught his first glimpse that day of his opponent. He had approached a group of men who appeared to be in the midst of an animated discussion, and suddenly, in the center of the group, he saw a medium-sized, bare-headed man with a little bristly mustache and sharp gray eyes.
It was Mr. Notter. He was talking in a half-bored, half-lively sort of manner with the farmers and village men who had garnered about him.
“He looks mighty cheerful,” muttered Simmons to himself, turning hastily away before Mr. Notter should see him.
It is time now to admit that Simmons himself was far from being cheerful. It would be unjust perhaps to say that he had any feeling of fear, but he was at least mentally uncomfortable.
As he walked away from the group which contained
Mr. Notter toward the other end of the grove, where preparations were in progress for the picnic feast, a feeling of indignation mounted slowly and steadily within him. What did Peter Boley mean by dragging him into this thing, anyway? Of course, he thought bitterly, it meant nothing to Peter; it meant nothing to all these people, gathered together from a morbid curiosity to see the flowing of blood; they weren’t going to stand roped in a ten-foot ring and let an ex-champion of Columbus smash them in the face! He hated them.
How absurd it was, anyway, for two grown men to deliberately set about punching each other! Perfectly silly. Oh, what an awful fool he had been to let it go so far as this! The scorn of the whole country would fall on his head if he should back out now. He gritted his teeth. He would have to see it through!