Morehouse began at the very beginning, looking oftener at the card between his fingers than at Hogarty's too brilliant eyes, which were fairly burning his face. "In the first place, Flash," he went on, "you know as well as I do that The Red isn't a real champion and never will be. He has the build and the punch, and he's game, too--you'll have to hand him that. But stacked up against the men who held the title ten years ago he'd last about five rounds--if he was lucky. I don't know why that is, either, unless he is so crooked at heart that he loses confidence even in himself when he has to face a real man. But the public at this minute thinks he is as great as the greatest. The way he polished off The Texan had convinced them of that--and we--well, the paper always tries to give them what they want, you know. "Now that was the reason I ran up north last week, after I'd got a tip that Conway hailed originally from a little New England village back in the hills--one of those towns that are almost as up-to-date today as they were fifty years ago. It looked like a nice catchy little story, which I will, of course, admit I could have faked just as well as not. But it was the cartoons I wanted. You can't really fake them--not after you've once known the real thing. And as it happens I have known it, for I came from a village up that way myself. "And, then, I was curious, too. I've always had a private opinion that if chance hadn't pitchforked Conway into the prize-ring he'd have made a grand success as a blackjack artist or a second-story man. But I wanted the pictures, and it wasn't a very difficult matter either to get them. You see I knew just where I'd find what I wanted, and things panned out pretty much as I thought they would. "It didn't take more than a half hour to spread the report that Conway was practically the only really famous man in the country today, and in a fair way to make his own home town just as celebrated. It may sound funny to you, for you don't know the back-country as I do, but just that short article in the daily, coupled with a few helpful hints from me that I was looking for all the nice, touching incidents of his boyhood days, with the opinions of the oldest inhabitants, and maybe a few of their pictures to be used in a big Sunday feature, brought them all out: the old circle of regulars which always sits around the tavern stove nights, straightening out the country's politics and attending strictly to everybody's affairs but their own.