The Abysmal Brute

An excerpt:. SAM STUBENER ran through his mail carelessly and rapidly. As became a manager of prize-fighters he was accustomed to a various and bizarre correspondence. Every crank sport near sport and reformer seemed to have ideas to impart to him. From dire threats such as pushing in the front of his face from rabbit-foot fetishes to lucky horseshoes from dinky jerkwater bids to the quarter-of-a-million-dollar offers of irresponsible nobodies he knew the whole run of the surprise portion of his mail.. In his time having received a razor-strop made from the skin of a lynched Negro and a finger withered and sun-dried cur from the body of a white man found in Death Valley he was of the opinion that never again would the postman bring him anything that could startle him. But this morning he opened a letter that he read a second time put away in his pocket and took out for a third reading. It was postmarked from some unheard-of post office in Siskiyou County and it ran:. Dear Sam:.      You don't know me except my reputation. You come after my time and I've been out of the game a long time. But take it from me I ain't been asleep. I've followed you from the time Kal Aufman knocked you out to your last handling of Nat Belson and I take it you're the niftiest thing in the line of managers that ever came down the pike..      I got a proposition for you. I got the greatest unknown that ever happened. This ain't con. It's the straight goods. What do you think of a husky that tips the scales at two hundred and twenty pounds fighting weight is twenty-two years old and can hit a kick twice as hard as my best ever? That's him my boy Young Pat Glendon that's the name he'll fight under. I've planned it all out. Now the best thing you can do is hit the first train and come up here.