Her severe aspect, which, he knew, she assumed to compose herself, disappeared and the love that she bore him as her first and only son shone in her eyes as she kissed him when he left. It was like the kisses she had given him when he was a grammar school boy. Later in the day John met an old friend whom he had almost forgotten. It was the scrawny youth with the twisted nose and the husky voice who had been a second in his corner the night he fought Battling Rodriguez to get money to pay for his father's funeral. He remembered the youth as Murphy when he met him lounging at the counter of a cigar stand at the entrance to one of Spring street's most celebrated saloons, which now was converted into a soft drink and lunch establishment and which was frequented by men who loitered in and around it for the associations it held for them and the memory of other days. Murphy, a brown paper cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, hailed him as he passed. "If it ain't da Gallant kid!" he said, speaking from beneath the visor of his cloth cap, pulled tightly around his ears. They shook hands. "Hello, Murphy, what have you been doing since the night that Mexican nearly killed me?" asked John, feeling somehow that he owed the second something for the care he had taken of him after he had staggered from the ring, bruised and battered. "Oh, da same old stuff, da same old stuff," Murphy replied. "Haven't been doin' any more fightin', have ya?" "No," said John, with a laugh, "the beating the Battler gave me was enough. You know, it's a good man who knows when he has had enough." "Ya didn't seem to know when ya had enough da night ya mixed it with da Battler," said Murphy. "Ya took a beltin' that night and came up for more as long as ya could." "Let's step inside; I'll buy you a drink of whatever they have," John invited. Over steins of near-beer which Murphy drank with a wry face John learned that Battling Rodriguez had fought himself to the top and was now boxing main events at Vernon, at the American Legion stadium in Hollywood and occasionally in San Francisco and San Diego. He told Murphy that he was working on the newspaper, endeavoring to develop himself into a reporter. They were about to leave and had turned away from the bar when there was a scuffle of feet at the front door. John was startled to see a number of men rush in and form a line across the front of the long room. It flashed into his head that the men were bandits. One of them, he saw, had a gun in his hand. But this suspicion was quickly routed from his mind when one of the men, apparently the leader, stepped forward and shouted a command: "Get in the corner, there, you birds, you're pinched," he ordered. John recognized the men as deputy sheriffs and for a moment he was nonplussed. Then he stepped forward to explain there was no cause for them to arrest them.