Adventure and adventurers -- Fiction; Short stories
“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
call the dye-rooms the “suicide-holes,” where a year was death. He
saw the little patio, and his mother cooking and moiling at crude
housekeeping and finding time to caress and love him. And his father he
saw, large, big-moustached and deep-chested, kindly above all men,
who loved all men and whose heart was so large that there was love to
overflowing still left for the mother and the little muchacho playing
in the corner of the patio. In those days his name had not been Felipe
Rivera. It had been Fernandez, his father's and mother's name. Him had
they called Juan. Later, he had changed it himself, for he had found
the name of Fernandez hated by prefects of police, jefes politicos, and
rurales.
Big, hearty Joaquin Fernandez! A large place he occupied in Rivera's
visions. He had not understood at the time, but looking back he could
understand. He could see him setting type in the little printery, or
scribbling endless hasty, nervous lines on the much-cluttered desk. And
he could see the strange evenings, when workmen, coming secretly in the
dark like men who did ill deeds, met with his father and talked long
hours where he, the muchacho, lay not always asleep in the corner.
As from a remote distance he could hear Spider Hagerty saying to him:
“No layin' down at the start. Them's instructions. Take a beatin' and
earn your dough.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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