could there be for Joe in that brutal surging and straining of bodies, those fierce clutches, fiercer blows, and terrible hurts?  Surely, she, Genevieve, offered more than that—­rest, and content, and sweet, calm joy.  Her bid for the heart of him and the soul of him was finer and more generous than the bid of the Game; yet he dallied with both—­held her in his arms, but turned his head to listen to that other and siren call she could not understand.

The gong struck.  The round ended with a break in Ponta’s corner.  The white-faced young second was through the ropes with the first clash of sound.  He seized Joe in his arms, lifted him clear of the floor, and ran with him across the ring to his own corner.  His seconds worked over him furiously, chafing his legs, slapping his abdomen, stretching the hip-cloth out with their fingers so that he might breathe more easily.  For the first time Genevieve saw the stomach-breathing of a man, an abdomen that rose and fell far more with every breath than her breast rose and fell after she had run for a car.  The pungency of ammonia bit her nostrils, wafted to her from the soaked sponge wherefrom he breathed the fiery fumes that cleared his brain.  He gargled his mouth and throat, took a suck at a divided lemon, and all the while the towels worked like mad, driving oxygen into his lungs to purge the pounding blood and send it back revivified for the struggle yet to come.  His heated body was sponged with water, doused with it, and bottles were turned mouth-downward on his head.

CHAPTER VI

The gong for the sixth round struck, and both men advanced to meet each other, their bodies glistening with water.  Ponta rushed two-thirds of the way across the ring, so intent was he on getting at his man before full recovery could be effected.  But Joe had lived through.  He was strong again, and getting stronger.  He blocked several vicious blows and then smashed back, sending Ponta reeling.  He attempted to follow up, but wisely forbore and contented himself with blocking and covering up in the whirlwind his blow had raised.

The fight was as it had been at the beginning—­Joe protecting, Ponta rushing.  But Ponta was never at ease.  He did not have it all his own way.  At any moment, in his fiercest onslaughts, his opponent was liable to lash out and reach him.  Joe saved his strength.  He struck one blow to Ponta’s ten, but his one blow rarely missed.  Ponta overwhelmed him in the attacks, yet could do nothing with him, while Joe’s tiger-like strokes, always imminent, compelled respect.  They toned Ponta’s ferocity.  He was no longer able to go in with the complete abandon of destructiveness which had marked his earlier efforts.

But a change was coming over the fight.  The audience was quick to note it, and even Genevieve saw it by the beginning of the ninth round.  Joe was taking the offensive.  In the clinches it was he who brought his fist down on the small of the back, striking the terrible kidney blow.  He did it once, in each clinch, but with all his strength, and he did it every clinch.  Then, in the breakaways, he began to uppercut Ponta on the stomach, or to hook his jaw or strike straight out upon the mouth.  But at first sign of a coming of a whirlwind, Joe would dance nimbly away and cover up.