who, stripped save for the flat
shoes upon their feet and the trunks about their hips, followed them
into the ring.

"Preliminary!" Morehouse had said, and there had been something of
disinterested contempt in his voice. Old Jerry felt, too, the entire
great crowd's disinterested, good-natured tolerance. They were waiting
for something else.

Twice Morehouse left his place at the long board desk and wended his
way off through the maze of aisles. The second time he returned, after
the third match had been finished, Old Jerry caught sight of his face
while he was a long way off--and Old Jerry's breath caught in his
throat. His plump cheeks were pale when he crowded back into his
place. The old man leaned nearer and tried to ask a question and his
dry tongue refused. The plump reporter nodded his head.

Again the men came with their bottles of water--their pails--their
towels and sponges. There was a third man who slipped agilely into the
nearest corner. Old Jerry saw him turn once and nod reassuringly, he
thought, at Morehouse. The little mail carrier did not know him;
everybody else within a radius of yards had apparently recognized him,
but he could not take his eyes off that lean, hard face. There was a
kind of satanic, methodical deadliness in Hogarty's directions to the
other two men inside the ropes.

Even while he was staring at him, fascinated, that hand-clapping
stormed up again, and then swelled to a hoarse roar that went
hammering to the roof. A figure passed Old Jerry, so close that the
long robe which wrapped him brushed his knee. When Hogarty had
stripped the robe away and the figure went on--on up through the
ropes--he recognized him.

As Young Denny seated himself in the corner just above them Morehouse
threw out his arm and forced Old Jerry back into his seat. Then the
little man remembered and shrank back, but his eyes glowed. He forgot
to watch for the coming of the other in dumb amaze at the wide expanse
of the boy's shoulders that rose white as the narrow cloth that
encircled his hips. Dazed, he listened to them shouting the name by
which they knew him--"The Pilgrim"--and he did not turn away until Jed
Conway was in the ring.

He heard first the cheers that greeted the newcomer--broken
reiterations of "Oh, you Red!" But the same heartiness was not there,
nor the volume. When Old Jerry's eyes crept furtively across the ring
he understood the reason.

It was the same face that he had known be