It was a crowded, ill-lighted hall, barn-like in its proportions, and the smoke-laden air gave a peculiar distortion to everything.  She felt as though she would stifle.  There were shrill cries of boys selling programmes and soda water, and there was a great bass rumble of masculine voices.  She heard a voice offering ten to six on Joe Fleming.  The utterance was monotonous—­hopeless, it seemed to her, and she felt a quick thrill.  It was her Joe against whom everybody was to bet.

And she felt other thrills.  Her blood was touched, as by fire, with romance, adventure—­the unknown, the mysterious, the terrible—­as she penetrated this haunt of men where women came not.  And there were other thrills.  It was the only time in her life she had dared the rash thing.  For the first time she was overstepping the bounds laid down by that harshest of tyrants, the Mrs. Grundy of the working class.  She felt fear, and for herself, though the moment before she had been thinking only of Joe.

Before she knew it, the front of the hall had been reached, and she had gone up half a dozen steps into a small dressing-room.  This was crowded to suffocation—­by men who played the Game, she concluded, in one capacity or another.  And here she lost Joe.  But before the real personal fright could soundly clutch her, one of the young fellows said gruffly, “Come along with me, you,” and as she wedged out at his heels she noticed that another one of the escort was following her.

They came upon a sort of stage, which accommodated three rows of men; and she caught her first glimpse of the squared ring.  She was on a level with it, and so near that she could have reached out and touched its ropes.  She noticed that it was covered with padded canvas.  Beyond the ring, and on either side, as in a fog, she could see the crowded house.

The dressing-room she had left abutted upon one corner of the ring.  Squeezing her way after her guide through the seated men, she crossed the end of the hall and entered a similar dressing-room at the other corner of the ring.

“Now don’t make a noise, and stay here till I come for you,” instructed her guide, pointing out a peep-hole arrangement in the wall of the room.

CHAPTER IV

She hurried to the peep-hole, and found herself against the ring.  She could see the whole of it, though part of the audience was shut off.  The ring was well lighted by an overhead cluster of patent gas-burners.  The front row of the men she had squeezed past, because of their paper and pencils, she decided to be reporters from the local papers up-town.  One of them was chewing gum.  Behind them, on the other two rows of seats, she could make out firemen from the near-by engine-house and several policemen in uniform.  In the middle of the front row, flanked by the reporters, sat the young chief of police.  She was startled by catching sight of Mr. Clausen on the opposite side of the ring.  There he sat, austere, side-whiskered, pink and white, close up against the front of the ring.  Several seats farther on, in the same front row, she discovered Silverstein, his weazen features glowing with anticipation.