"Buncombe!" said Jack, who knew the game. "They want to worry the odds down a bit. He's fit as a fiddle. You can be sure of that."
The early afternoon papers contained the first hint that Jim Robinson was not what he was supposed to be. A heading on the sporting page caught my eyes. I have kept it among my papers and give it verbatim.
PUGILIST SOCIETY MAN JIM ROBINSON, THE HEAVY WEIGHT, A MASQUERADER.
A story is going the rounds that Jim Robinson, the heavyweight, who goes against Sailor Clancy in the principal event at the Garden tonight, is not Robinson at all, but a well-known society man and millionaire. From the hour when this match was made in May last there has been a mystery attached to the personality of this fighter never before heard of in Fistiana in New York. Flynn, his backer and trainer, could not be found to deny or affirm the rumor, and his sparring partners at Flynn's Gymnasium, of course, denied it, but every circumstance, including the size of the purse, now believed to be five thousand dollars, would indicate that Flynn's Unknown, unless a well-known Westerner in disguise, is a man of more than usual ability--or else a millionaire sport, bent on enriching the hard-fisted sailor, who thinks he sees a chance of picking up some easy money besides his share of the gate. Whoever Jim Robinson is, we welcome him cordially.
But we also warn him that New York is tired of ring fakes and that nothing but a good mill will justify the prices asked.
I showed the thing to Ballard, who read it through eagerly, his lips emitting a thin whistle.
"Ph-ew! They're getting 'warm,' Pope. Somebody's leaked."
"May be the management--to draw the crowd." And then, looking at the front page, "That's only the twelve o'clock edition. Perhaps--"
He paused and rang the bell (we were at his rooms again), instructing his man to go out on the street and buy copies of the latest editions of all the afternoon papers.
"It would be the deuce if they followed that up."
He walked to and fro while we waited impatiently. And in a short while our worst fears were realized, for when the papers came we saw the dreadful facts in scare heads on the first page of the yellowest of them. I give the item here: