Tiger Syrup

by Richard Connell

 

Tiger Syrup

By Richard Connell

HIT? Could that boy hit? Plenty! His right was like a whizz-bang crashing into a gas-tank, and his left darted in and out like a snake's tongue. In all my twenty-odd years as a sporting editor in the big town I never saw a more promising-looking piece of ebony fighting machinery.

I had dropped in at Billy Quirk's training gym to see how the cauliflower crop was coming along, and to watch that crafty old trainer in the process of turning raw fighting meat into highly polished championship material.

My eyes swept the familiar scene. Then, out of the hurly-burly of panting torsos and whirling limbs, there seemed to pop one black figure, in startling contrast with the lighter-hued athletes about him. My eyes focused on the stranger and stayed focused.

He was the blackest thing I ever saw in my life—blacker than a crow at mid night, blacker than the interior of a whale, blacker than the cellar of the Mammoth Cave, blacker than black velvet. But it wasn't his color, so much, that made me, a hardened old sporting writer, stop and stare. It was his marvelous speed and the ease and power of his work. The boy was a cross between a panther and a blacksnake.

He was boxing a big, rough heavyweight about the size of a taxi-cab, and although he was only a middleweight himself, he was slamming the everlasting daylights out of the big fellow. He seemed to have everything a fighter needs—the science of Gans, the pugnacity of Walcott, the defense of Jack Johnson, the speed of Dixon and the wallop of Sam Lanord. His long, cablelike arms, with their free play of muscle, permitted his knuckles almost to dust the ground as he walked. He had no neck to speak of. Directly on his powerful shoulders was set a head little bigger than a good-sized coconut.

He appeared to be only a kid, and when he caught me watching him a bashful sort of smile spread from ear to ear, showing about a hundred perfect teeth.

Old Jay Whalen, boxing editor of the Morning Star, had strolled in and stood beside me watching the work of the unknown black boy. Jay was an old-timer when John L. was a baby, and I turned to him for his opinion of the ebony warrior.

“Looks good to me,” I said. “Who is he?”

“That's Coco Feeney,” answered Jay, with a pull on his battered meerschaum, “and 'looks good' just about lets him out.”

“Why? Isn't he as good! as he looks?” I asked.

“Naw. No heart,” replied Jay laconically.

Coco had just dropped the heavy with a sweet 1eft hook, and his little round face was lit up with an expansive grin.

“No lack of heart in a wallop like that,” I remarked.

“No heart, just the same,” said Jay. “Funny. O.K. in the gym. Looks to a world-beater. Get him in a regular ring—no heart. Tenth-raters beat him. Seems paralyzed. Or scared to death. Dub.” Jay always talked like a telegram.

“You must have the wrong dope, Jay,” I said. “Why, that kid Coco is a natural-born marvel. You must be mistaken.”

“All right. See for yourself. He boxes Bo Clancy at the Olympic next Monday.” And Jay, puffing smoke like a tramp steamer, sailed out of the gym.

II

I WAS at the ringside at the Olympic Club Monday night to see Coco in real action. I had made his acquaintance in the meantime, and had found him to be a good-natured, retiring, likable young fellow, with none of the bumptiousness that he might easily have had. Indeed, his modest demeanor was a pleasant relief after the swaggerings of the pugs that infested my office to have me publish a “defi,” or to tell me what they'd do to Jack Dempsey if they ever got him in a ring. Coco was “fum Bummingham, Alabamah,” and he had been a “stevedoah in de woah.” He saved his money and supported his mammy in a style that was the envy of all the colored sisters in that part of Birmingham.

An elemental person was Coco, with a very limited vocabulary and few ideas. He worked hard at the gym, took good care of himself, and in those moments when he was not in active training he spent his time in the comparatively innocent occupation of walking up and down Lenox Avenue with other dandies of similar complexion, dressed simply but richly in a checked suit, with numerous small pearl buttons sewed on by a prodigal tailor, a purple and green shirt of almost silk, with collar to match, a tie that was orange where it wasn't red, a fuzzy hat, made, apparently, of canary-bird fuzz, and neat buttoned shoes whose creamy tops contrasted with their coffee bottoms. His crowning sartorial glory was his watch-charm—an enormous gold-mounted rabbit's foot!

As I sat at the Olympic ringside, I hoped that Jay Whalen had the wrong dope about Coco and his heart. His opponent that night, Bo Clancy, was a third-rater at best, whose principal ring assets were a concrete jaw and a wild swing. I figured he'd be a violet-scented cinch for Coco, with that rapier right and wicked left of his.

But Jay Whalen was right. When Coco stepped in, looking like a statue done in black marble, I saw at once that some strange change had come over him. He was apparently pop-eyed with fright. The bell rang, and Clancy at once tumbled into a clinch. I saw him whisper something in Coco's ear, and the effect was much the same as if he had landed a blow in a vital spot. Coco's knees seemed to bog down, his little face was wrinkled in an agony of dismay.

He looked beaten before the fight had really begun.

Gone was that darting, smashing attack that suggested the panther. Gone was that graceful, evading speed that suggested the blacksnake. He was just a badly scared darky on the run. Clancy, heavy-footed and without science, rush after him and Coco rushed away. The black boy neglected a hundred openings into which he might have thrust one short, decisive punch, during the six painful rounds that followed. All his fighting skill had been left in the gym, that was clear.

By clinching, ducking, retreating, he managed to stay the limit, but Clancy, the third-rater, outfought and outpointed him by a mile. Billy Quirk sat in Coco's corner, and even his stern old poker-face couldn't conceal the disappointment he felt at the wretched showing of his pupil.

I was puzzled. In all my experience I had never known a case just like it. Was it lack of heart? Was it pure yellowness? Perhaps. Yet Coco in the gym mixed it gladly with the biggest and roughest that came along. What was it then?

I decided to look up Billy Quirk and find out. He must know. Billy had been a great, game little fighter in the bare-knuckle days, and, with fists pickled in brine to make them tough, he had fought to a finish many a time, on the turf, for a princely purse of fifty dollars. Only a man who was a fighter at heart went in for the game in those days. To-day a good many boxers are merely financiers with good physiques and press-agents. Billy was in the game because he loved to fight, and I knew that he could spot a quitter, for he hated one. If Coco was a quitter, why, then, had Billy Quirk taken him under his wing and spent a lot of valuable time coaching him?

III

I FOUND Billy out on his little health-farm in Jersey, teaching his grandson, aged four, how to execute an effective left-jab. It was here that Billy spent part of his time, rebuilding fatigued captains of industry and depaunching bankers, professors and actors.

He came bounding toward me, a picture of health in white flannels, and gave me a hand-shake that felt as if I'd touched a live wire.

“Well, can I make a white hope outa yuh?” he asked. This was his stock joke with me, which he hadn't varied in the fifteen years I had known him.

“No, but you can tell me if you are ever going to be able to make a black hope out of Coco Feeney,” I said.

I thought a slightly worried look flashed into Billy's tanned, incisive face as he answered my question by asking another. “Well, waddda yuh think?”

Illustration: I heard Dad Finn, with a leer and a sneer, say: I'm going to give some Birmingham undertaker a job tonight.

“Frankly, Billy, I don't know what to think about Coco. When I saw him in the gym, I thought he was a world beater. I thought you'd discovered another Joe Gans. But when I saw him in the ring against Clancy, he didn't seem to be the same man. He was terrible. I could have licked him myself.”

“So yuh could, so yuh could,” said Billy, unsmilingly. “That's just it. Anybody can lick him in the ring. But the champ himself couldn't do it in the gym. 'S funny, damn funny.”

“What's the answer?” I demanded. “Is he yellow?”

“Naw, he's not. Don't yuh believe it. I don't have yella guys in my stable. Yuh know that. And I know a game guy from a yella one in the dark. That dinge is game, take it from me. It's sompin else.”

“Well, what is it? Tell me, and I'll keep it mum, if you say the word. The boy interests me. He seems to have everything a fighter needs—yet he is a fizzle. The problem interests me, as a lifelong student of the fight game. Why is he such a lemon in the ring, Billy?”

The old trainer led me to a seat on the porch of his house and said: “I'll tell yuh. But, remember, I don't want nothin' published in the papers till I give the word. Get me?”

I assured him that I got him.

“The reason Coco can't fight,” he said solemnly, “is because he thinks he can't. An' that's the whole trouble.”

He paused to light up a venerable corncob, and then went on: “I know that boy ain't yella. In the gym he's willin' to tackle any guy, no matter how savage he is. An' onst, in the street, a gang of young hoodlums, all bigger than him, jumped on him and started to kick the tar outa him. He coulda run away. But he didn't. He stood there and battled the whole gang of them. He'd knocked four of them cold, when I came along and stopped the slaughter. Yes, the kid's game. But in the ring it's sompin else again. Somebody got his goat onst and he ain't never got it back. This is how it happens

“Several years back, when I was off in Australia with a bunch of fighters, I left Coco back here. He was just a green kid of eighteen then, hardly ripe for the prelims even, and I was coaxin' him along sorta gradual, because I could see that he had the real stuff, and would be a crackerjack some day. I had let him meet a lotta tenth-rate boys—set-ups they was—because I was matchin' him careful so that he'd develop confidence when he came to box the first-rate boys. When I left, I give him strict instructions to go easy and box only the soft ones till I got back. Well, I stayed out there longer than I planned to, and what does Coco do but make a match with Dad Finn. Or, what really happened was Dad Finn forces the poor, ignorant smoke into makin' a match with him.

“Yuh see, Dad Finn hates me like poison. I showed him up onct for the dirty crook he is, and he'd been schemin' to get back at me. You know what a sweet rep he's got. One of you sport-writers christened him the Guinea Pig, because he's a good thing to try experiments on. Yuh know, no fighter stands a chance of meeting the Champ until he first beats Dad Finn. Dad is a sort of gateway. He'll never beat the Champ himself, because he is too old, too fat and too slow, but he'll kill the hopes of a lot of ambitious boys, for he's one tough customer. That old bald head of his is full of dirty tricks. Believe me, there ain't a trickier bird in the game, unless it's his manager, Joe Fisher. That's a fine pair of yeggs for yuh and a disgrace to the game!”

Billy digressed a moment to relieve his feelings by language more vigorous than printable. “Well, Dad Finn knew that I had my heart set on making a top-notcher of Coco. And he thought he'd peeve me by getting to the boy while I was away, and busting up his fighting career. He knew, also, that he could never in the world beat Coco in a fair fight. So he and Fisher set out to get Coco's goat, and I must say they made a scientific job of it. Only the other day I got the inside story. I told it to a Columbia University prof who comes up here to improve his punch, and he says they used 'the power of suggestion.'

“Their idea was to beat Coco before he stepped into the ring by making him think he was a bum, and that he didn't have a chance to win. And they done it! That big rabbit's foot he wears was a tip-off to them. They soon sized him up for what he is—a simple-minded, superstitious darky, a believer in signs, omens, weejee boards, hoodoos and vcoos.

“You'd hardly believe the trouble them two crooks went to to scare all the fight outa Coco. First, they fixed it so that the mirror in the gym where he was trainin' should fall with a crash while he was lookin' in it. Seven years bad luck, of course, was what it meant to the poor smoke. Then they got a kid to dump a bag of black cats into Coco's dressin'-room, and, of course, some of the cats crossed his path. More bad luck. I got this dope from Turtle-neck Toomey, who used to be a sparrin'-partner of Dad Finn's but who reformed.

“THEN they sent him post-cards every day. They had skulls and bones drawed on them in blood-red ink, and the words 'COCO CAN'T FIGHT' printed on them. Every morning he got one of them. Anybody but a dumb-bell darky would have seen right off that it was a frame-up, but Coco fell for it. Can yuh imagine it? Two or three times a day some guy would call Coco up on the telephone. Sometimes they'd get him outa bed at two in the mornin'. The guy would say in a deep and awful voice, 'Is this Clarence Dillingham Feeney,' which is Coco's whole name. 'Yessuh,' Coco would answer—he's scared of telephones, anyhow. 'Clarence Dillingham Feeney,' the guy would rumble, 'thou art accursed. Thou can't fight in no ring. Thou CANT FIGHT.'

“I dunno why spooks is always supposed to say 'thou,' but that is what this guy used to say, and Coco begun to lose weight and look worried. Oh, how I wish I'd been here. But I wasn't, and the little fool was goin' it alone, with no mother to guide him, so to speak.

“They got to sendin' telegrams to Coco that would be delivered at midnight. Of course, y'know, a telegram always means bad news anyhow to a darky, and poor Coco would tear open the envelope, with tremblin' fingers, and then read 'COCO CAN'T FIGHT,'signed, 'The Evil Spirit.' Then he'd be too scared to sleep, and would lose another pound.

“HE WAS one hoodooed coon the day before the fight, when the two crooks got in their last and best piece of hellishness. They slipped some old gipsy fortune-teller five bucks, taught her what to say, and sent her around to see Coco. Now Coco has a great weakness for havin' his fortune told, and she had no trouble gettin' him to let her have a slant at his palm. The minute she picks up Coco's hand, she lets a yell outa her as if she's been stung by a wasp.

“'Oh, unhappy man,' she hollers. 'What is this I see?'

“'Good Lode, ma'am, what does yuh see?' gasps Coco, his teeth chattering.

“'I see that thou art accursed. Thy fight line is broke plum' in half. That means that thou can not fight in a ring. The minute thou puts up thy mitts against this here—what his name—oh, yes, Finn—thy eye will lose its cunnin' and thy arm will lose its punch. Oh, unlucky black man, Shish Kabab, Goddess of Swat, is angry with thee, and has told the Evil Spirit to put the triple curse on thee. Thou can never, never, never win a fight. Give it up, foolish Ethiopian, and go back to thy old trade of tossin' cotton bales into freight cars. For thou can never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never win a fight. I have spoken.'

“With that, she blows, leavin' Coco as pale as new tan shoes, which is some pale for Coco.

“When the poor kid stepped into the ring next night his goat was in Siberia. Dad Finn steps up to him as he sits in the corner, gives him a nasty glare, and says. 'Boy, what day's to-day?'

“'Hit am de tent ob May,' says Coco.

“'Well,' says Dad, with a scowl that would have curdled milk, 'on de tent of May next year, you'll be just one year dead.'

“When the bell rings, Dad stands up, rubbers around the crowd, and barks, 'Is there an undertaker in de house? I'll have a nice corpse ready for him in about a minute.'

“Poor Coco! He fights, so this Columbia professor tells me, subconsciously. An' at that he is almost as good as Dad Finn. But Finn has a jaw like a pavin'-block and when Coco lands, Dad just laughs and says: 'Nig, yuh couldn't lick your weight in cream-puffs. Do yuh call that a punch? Why, your punch wouldn't dent a derby hat.' Which doesn't encourage Coco none, for in his other fights, when he landed, the other fella usually showed that it hurt. Coco done the best he could—considerin' that his goat was gone. But when Dad shoots at him, 'Yuh blankety-blank hunka charcoal, I know that the Evril Spirit has got yuh hoodooed. Yuh can't fight,' Coco goes all to pieces, and Dad beats him pretty bad. This scrap takes all the heart out of the boy, for Dad was the first really good fighter he ever met, and it makes him think he's really a dub and an Accursed One, and he's just on the point of goin' back to Alabama to juggle cotton bales when I get home and persuade him to stick around and try another fight. I been workin' hard on him, and I thought he was pretty fit. But you seen him against that has-been, Clancy, and yuh seen how the old hoodoo worked. Clancy just whispers to him, 'Accursed one, yuh can't fight,' and Coco blows up. That's the story. What can we do about it?”

Billy Quirk and I spent the afternoon talking it over, discussing hoodoos in general, and scheming schemes, to regain the lost goat of Clarence Dillingham Feeney, ebony athlete. Finally, when it came time to catch the train back to town, I said to Billy:

“Next time that Columbia prof comes out here, why don't you put it up to him? He is prof of psychology up there, and maybe he knows something about the scientific method for recapturing a coon's goat.”

“Mebbe I will,” said Billy.

IV

A FEW days later I left for the Coast, to cover a lightweight championship, and, while I was out there, to take a bit of a vacation. It was some months before I got back. The first night after my return I dropped into the Olympic Club, without stopping to ask what the card of bouts was. The semi-final was just about to start. One of the contestants had already taken his corner, and was lolling there in a shrieking purple bathrobe, a look of unconcern on his battle-scarred face. It was Bo Clancy, and he looked in fit condition to put up the fight of his life. Then the second gladiator bounded through the ropes and I recognized Coco.

He hadn't changed, and yet he had. There was an undefinable something about his bearing that was different from the last time he had faced Clancy. He gave me a quick, slightly nervous grin. I watched him closely. His manner had a queer mixture of confidence and concern in it. He seemed to be waiting for something, as he sat while the referee introduced Clancy—for something besides the bell which would plunge him into the fight. His gloved hand kept slipping down and patting the pocket of his gaudy bathrobe.

He was introduced, and bobbed his head to the crowd. Then the tense moment before the gong came, and as he slipped off his bathrobe, he whipped from the pocket a small brown bottle of unusual shape, and raised it to his lips. As he took a short, quick drink, I saw him gasp, and I saw tears start to his eyes.

Replacing the bottle, he turned, at the gong, to meet Clancy, and I saw that some strange thing had happened. Ferocity blazed from his eyes. The fighting spirit of the cave-man defending his mate showed in his contracted face.

“Accursed One,” sang Bo Clancy, leading with his left. “Yuh can't fight. The Evil Spirit's put the curse on yuh.”

“He has, has he,” said Coco between his teeth, and countered with a right that staggered Clancy. Then the Coco of the ring became the panther-blacksnake Coco of the gym, and for concentrated fierceness of attack I've never seen anything to beat the way the little darky tore into his bigger opponent. Before the round was over he had knocked Clancy down twice, and had finally sent him hurtling through the ropes into the lap of a fat broker in the second row. Bo was out cold.

V

HERE was a mystery and a miracle.

What had come over Coco? What had put a new heart into him, had transformed him from a dub in the ring to a smashing, tearing tornado? Could it be the stuff in that queer brown bottle? It looked that way. One gulp had changed him, apparently, from a nervous kid into a raging lion. Had Billy Quirk discovered some marvelous new fluid, some elixir of swat, so potent that one small drink would turn a lamb into a wolf?

I sought out Billy at his office in his town gym.

“Well,” I said, “you certainly seem to have restored Coco's morale.”

“If by morale yuh mean goat, you said a bucketful,” replied Billy.

“How on earth did you do it?”

“I didn't do it.”

“Who or what did it, then?”

He looked mysterious. “Tiger Syrup,” he said.

“Tiger Syrup?”

“Yep, Tiger Syrup!”

Then he told me this story, after I had promised to keep it mum until he should be ready to have it known.

Coco, so Billy said, was just adjusting a necktie of artistic pattern, showing golden butterflies playing amid emerald-green leaves on a background of pink, in his dressing room in Quirk's Gym. He had been rematched with Bo Clancy, and he was training for the bout which was to decide for once and all whether he should continue in the ring, or, a beaten man, return to overalls and Birmingham freight-yards. As Coco gave a final pat to his horseshoe pin of imitation diamonds, three raps sounded on the door. Coco opened it. In stepped a gipsy—one of the gipsiest gipsies ever seen—aged, wrinkled, with earrings like saucers. Coco started back, and his eyes showed all white.

“'Yuh leave me be, gipsy,' he faltered. 'I ain' done nothin' wrong. I doan expeck to win no fight. I'se gwine back to Bummingham. hones' I is. I knows I'se accussed, gipsy.'

“'Misguided and suspicious African,' says the old dame in a slightly Hibernian accent, 'how does thou get that way? I am thy friend, thou poor fish. Listen, here, you.'

“She grabbed Coco's hand. He was scared too limp to resist.

'“I see by this paw,” she pipes, 'that Shish Kabab, Goddess of Swat, is no longer angry with thee. She will give thee back thy punch. She has sent thee this magic bottle of Tiger Syrup. It contains the most powerful potion known to man or devil. To make this quart bottle of Tiger Syrup, three hundred thousand savage tigers were boiled down. One swig of this stuff, Clarence Dillingham Feeney, and you are as fierce as three hundred and fifty-nine tigers. Just before you start to fight in the ring, take one swig of it, and no man can stand up against you.'

“'Oh, lady gipsy, is you tellin' me de troot?” gasps Coco.

“'I art,' says the gipsy. And she goes.”

That afternoon, just before Coco started to spar with a heavyweight in the gym, Billy Quirk saw him take a drink from the brown bottle. He saw Coco's chest expand and his eyes dilate. In less than a minute, the heavyweight was battered down by the violence of Coco's assault. He had tried Tiger Syrup. It worked!

I listened, amazed, to this story.

“Billy,” I asked, “what is this stuff?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Coco guards that bottle as if it were his life,” he said, by way of reply. “He sleeps with it under his pillow. No chance to examine it.”

I left the gym, mystified. A few days later I learned that Coco had been matched to meet Dad Finn again. Dad had a new lease on life, had done some strict training, and was doing the best fighting of his career. If Coco could beat him, the road of Billy's dusky pupil to a match with the champion was clear. But it is an old ring adage that “they never come back,” and that if a man once beats another one he can always beat him thereafter. That bout will test Tiger Syrup, all right, I thought. And I made up my mind I'd see that scrap.

VI

DAD FINN kept Coco waiting in the ring a long time on the night of their second battle—an old trick to make a nervous man more nervous. When he finally stepped through the ropes, he gave Coco a glare that would have scared the Dead Sea alive. Coco tried to return it, and then dropped his eyes. From my ringside seat I could see little beads of perspiration form on his half-inch of brow.

“He's a beaten man, now,” said Jay Whalen, who sat next to me. “Once yellow, always yellow.” And I was afraid he spoke the truth. I shot a look at Billy Quirk, busy in Coco's corner. The old trainer looked serene, even cheerful. But Coco, without question, was in a funk.

When the referee was examining their bandaged hands, I heard Dad Finn, with a leer and a sneer, say: “Nig, I'm goin' to give some Birmingham undertaker a job to-night. I can lick all the hoodooed coons that ever lived. You ain't got a show. The Evil Spirit told me so.”

Coco moistened dry lips as if to reply, but said nothing. I watched his knees and saw that they were trembling. I wondered how long Dad Finn would let him last. I feared that Finn, known for his cruelty and cunning, would beat up Coco before the eyes of Billy Quirk; would prolong the bout so that he could cut the frightened but game boy to ribbons, just to humiliate the man who had trained Coco. For I could see with half an eye that Coco was too rattled, too paralyzed by the old jinx, to do anything but take a beating.

The time-keeper hoisted his hand, ready to strike the gong. Coco suddenly turned to Billy Quirk, who handed him the queer brown bottle. Tilting back his head, Coco poured a big drink into his quivering throat. It half-blinded and half-choked him. Then, Bong! The bell!

It all happened so quickly that my trained eye could hardly follow it. From Coco's corner shot a black thunderbolt, a wild thing that hurled itself at the astounded Dad, and beat him back with a torrent of lightning blows. Dad, veteran of many an assault, clinched, but Coco shook him loose, and crashed home blow after blow. A more dismayed look I have never seen on human face than the look in Dad Finn's as he tried to protect his paving-block jaw from the torrent of punishing blows. He couldn't understand it.

“Accursed One!” he managed to rasp, as he clinched desperately.

“Rat!” replied Coco, and stopped Dad's oaths that followed with a stinging jab on the mouth.

Dad was wild. Desperate measures were needed. He clinched with Coco, and I saw his small, evil eye watching Slim Boyle, the referee. There was a fraction of a second of silence. It was pierced by a shrill cry from Finn's corner.

“Hey, Slim, look!” cried Joe Fisher, the manager of the beaten Dad. For just an instant the referee, caught off his guard, glanced toward Fisher. It was long enough. Dad shot home a foul blow. Coco's lips went ashen with pain. Billy Quirk let out a bellow of rage and protest. But Referee Boyle hadn't seen it. And just then the round was up.

Coco tottered to his corner, nearly out. In vain did Billy Quirk rub him, flap towels, plead with him. The blow had partly paralyzed him for the time. If he could not come up in sixty short seconds, the fight was Dad's. For once in his life, Billy Quirk was rattled. He bent over Coco, and I saw the boy's lips move. I have been to the movies enough to read lips sometimes, and I saw that Coco was saying, “Tiguh Syrup.” Billy, rattled, had forgotten about it. He grabbed the brown bottle, pushed open Coco's mouth, and poured great gulps of it into the almost unconscious fighter. Then the bell rang.

Coco straightened up slowly, and stood in his comer, uncertainly, groggily. Dad Finn, leering horribly toward Billy Quirk, came rushing across the ring to finish his victim. Coco's head was slightly bent, and his fists automatically had assumed a fighting position.

Just before Finn reached Coco I heard Billy Quirk snap sharply: “Coco, you're a tiger!” And I saw Coco's muscles grow suddenly taut, and 1 heard the growl and snarl of a jungle killer. Nobody, least of all Dad Finn, knows exactly to this day what happened, because there was a movement of inky black arms and legs too fast to follow. A white, hairy body shot through space and landed, limp, half out of the ring, in the corner opposite Coco's. A terrific right to the solar plexus and a savage left to the jaw had knocked Dad Finn out, and the referee could have tolled a thousand seconds over his prostrate form.

VII

THE next morning I went around to Quirk's Gym to contratulate Billy and Coco on the dramatic come-back. Coco was home in bed, but Billy was there, in his little office, adorned with autographed pictures of scores of celebrities of the ring.

He greeted me with a grin.

Illustration:When he was not in active training he spent his time walking up and down Lenox avenue with other dandies.

“Who said they never come back?” he asked, with a chuckle. “Ask Dad, he knows.”

“Billy,” I said, “I'm going to find out about Tiger Syrup.”

Billy got up, carefully locked the door, and said: “Wait a minute, will yuh? I got to do a little chemistry.”

From his pocket he took a queer-shaped brown bottle, identical with the one Coco carried.

From another pocket he took three smaller bottles. One was labeled “Aromatic Spirits of Ammonia,” one was “Jamaica Ginger,” and one was “Tabasco Sauce.” He carefully mixed the contents in a wash-bin and poured the poisonous-looking result into the queer brown bottle.

“For the love of Mike, what's the idea?” I asked

“Tiger Syrup,” he said solemnly.

“Tiger Syrup?”

“Sure. But don't shout about it. Y'see, Coco's supply is runnin' low. I'm goin' to have to hire Maggie Turner, her that used to be in burlesque years ago before she bought a farm out near mine, to put on her gipsy make-up again and slip Coco another bottle. He's matched to meet the champeen in a month, and he'll need it.”

“Do you mean to say that Tiger Syrup is nothing but spirits of ammonia, ginger and tabasco?”

“Sure. But with just a bit of imagination thrown in.”

“And you got back Coco's goat with it?”

“Well,” said Billy modestly. “I'll admit that it was my idea to call it Tiger Syrup, but the idea was really thought up by that professor up to Columbia.”

“You mean Professor Garrison, the psychologist?”

“That's the baby. And here is a letter he wrote to me, after I put Coco's problem up to him.” He handed me the letter and I read:

The negro in question is undoubtedly suffering from psychological handicaps. It has been impressed on him by the power of suggestion that he can not fight. It must now be impressed on his brain, by the power of counter-suggestion, that he can fight. A possible method is to give him an evil-tasting, mildly stimulating fluid in such a way that he will believe it to have magic properties. His imagination will do the rest. A man who thinks he has the fighting power is in a fair way toward actually having that power.

Billy shook the bottle thoughtfully.

“Have a drink of Tiger Syrup?” he asked.