Since he had gone in for wrestling he had made it the specialty of all his athletic exercises.  He had practised everything that had any bearing on the strengthening of particular muscles or general agility.  He had practised cart-wheels, hand-springs, back and front flips.  He had worked with his neck at the chest-weight machine.  He would walk on his hands to strengthen his throat, and his collars had grown in a few weeks from thirteen and a half to fifteen, and he could no longer wear his old shirts without splitting them.  He made the mats in the Kingston gymnasium almost his home.

His special studies were bridging and spinning.  He spent hours on his back, rising to his two feet and his head and then rolling from one shoulder to the other and spinning to his front.  When he had his bridge-building abilities fairly well started, he compelled his heavy chum Sawed-Off to act as a living meal-bag, and rolled around upon the top of his head and bridged, with Sawed-Off laying all his weight across his chest.  When he went to bed he bridged there until the best of wrestlers, sleep, had downed him.  When he woke in the morning, he fell out of bed to the floor, turning his head under him and rolling so as not to break his neck or any bones, and bridging rigidly upon his head and bare feet.

Jumbo knew that, whatever might be the ability of his rival, the Trojan Ware, at least he, Jumbo, could have his conscience easy with the thought that he had made the most profitable use of the short time he had spent on wrestling, and that he would put up as good a fight as was in him.

More than that no athlete can do.

Jumbo and Ware met upon the mattress with their close-shaven heads looking like bulldogs’ jowls; and they shook hands—­if one can imagine bulldogs shaking hands.

Jumbo had two cardinal principles, but he could put neither of them into practice in the first maneuvers:  the first was always to try to get out of one difficulty by dumping the opponent into another; the second was always to try for straight-arm leverages.

Ware being the larger of the two, Jumbo was content to play a waiting game and find out something of the methods of his burly opponent.  He dodged here and there, avoiding the reaching lobster-claws of Ware by quick wriggles or by slapping his hands away as they thrust.  Suddenly Ware made a quick rush, and, breaking through Jumbo’s interference, seized him around the body to bend him backward.  But while the man was straining his hardest, Jumbo brought his hands around and placed them together in front of the pit of his stomach, so that the harder Ware squeezed the harder he pressed Jumbo’s fists into his abdomen.