entrance of the huge, bowl-shaped amphitheater, a sharp gust of
hand-clapping, broken by shrill whistling and shriller cat-calls, met
them. Far out across that room Old Jerry saw two figures, glistening
damp under the lights, crawl through the ropes that penned in a
high-raised platform in the very center of the building, and disappear
up an aisle.

He turned a dismayed face to Morehouse who, with one hand clutching
his arm, was deeply engrossed in a whispered conversation with a man
at the entrance--too engrossed to see. But when the newspaperman
turned at last to lead the way down into the body of the house he
explained in one brief word:

"Preliminary," he said.

Old Jerry did not understand. But half dragged, half led, he followed
blindly after his guide, until he found himself wedged into a seat at
the very edge of that roped-off, canvas-padded area. It was a single
long bench with a narrow board desk, set elbow high, running the
entire length in front of it. Peering half fearfully from the corner
of his eye Old Jerry realized that there were at least a full dozen
men beside themselves wedged in before it, and that, like Morehouse,
there was a block of paper before each man.

The awe with which the immensity of the place had stunned him began to
lessen a little and allowed him to look around. Wherever he turned a
sea of faces met him--faces strangely set and strained. Even under the
joviality of those closest to him he saw the tightened sinews of their
jaws. Those further away were blurred by the smoke that rose in a
never-thinning cloud, blurred until there was nothing but indistinct
blotches of white in the outer circles of seats.

And when he lifted his head and looked above him, he gasped. They were
there, too, tiny, featureless dots of white, like nothing so much as
holes in a black wall, in the smoke-drift that alternately hid and
revealed them.

Faces of men--faces of men, wherever he turned his head! Faces
strained and tense as they waited. That terrible tensity got under his
skin after a while; it crept in upon him until his spine crawled a
little, as if from cold. It was quiet, too; oddly quiet in spite of
the dull mumble that rose from thousands of throats.

Twice that hush was broken--twice when men laden with pails of water,
and bottles and sponges, and thick white towels crowded through the
ropes in front of him. Then the whole house was swept by a premature
storm of hand-clapping for the men