ing audience's money is, there is its
heart.

The Mexican boy sat down in his corner and waited. The slow minutes
lagged by. Danny was making him wait. It was an old trick, but ever it
worked on the young, new fighters. They grew frightened, sitting thus
and facing their own apprehensions and a callous, tobacco-smoking
audience. But for once the trick failed. Roberts was right. Rivera had
no goat. He, who was more delicately coordinated, more finely nerved and
strung than any of them, had no nerves of this sort. The atmosphere of
foredoomed defeat in his own corner had no effect on him. His handlers
were Gringos and strangers. Also they were scrubs--the dirty driftage
of the fight game, without honor, without efficiency. And they were
chilled, as well, with certitude that theirs was the losing corner.

"Now you gotta be careful," Spider Hagerty warned him. Spider was his
chief second. "Make it last as long as you can--them's my instructions
from Kelly. If you don't, the papers'll call it another bum fight and
give the game a bigger black eye in Los Angeles."

All of which was not encouraging. But Rivera took no notice. He despised
prize fighting. It was the hated game of the hated Gringo. He had taken
up with it, as a chopping block for others in the training quarters,
solely because he was starving. The fact that he was marvelously made
for it had meant nothing. He hated it. Not until he had come in to the
Junta, had he fought for money, and he had found the money easy. Not
first among the sons of men had he been to find himself successful at a
despised vocation.

He did not analyze. He merely knew that he must win this fight. There
could be no other outcome. For behind him, nerving him to this belief,
were profounder forces than any the crowded house dreamed. Danny Ward
fought for money, and for the easy ways of life that money would bring.
But the things Rivera fought for burned in his brain--blazing and
terrible visions, that, with eyes wide open, sitting lonely in the
corner of the ring and waiting for his tricky antagonist, he saw as
clearly as he had lived them.

He saw the white-walled, water-power factories of Rio Blanco. He saw the
six thousand workers, starved and wan, and the little children, seven
and eight years of age, who toiled long shifts for ten cents a day.
He saw the perambulating corpses, the ghastly death's heads of men who
labored in the dye-rooms. He remembered that he had heard his father