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[11 Mar 2010|03:52am] |
"Harder, hit it harder." Ted Grant instructed, as Neill worked over the heavy grain sack, set up to make for a pretty good punching bag. Ted Grant had once been one of the best prize fighters in the west, traveling with a show circuit, putting up five dollars that no man could beat him. None ever had. Now he was retired from the circuit, and focusing on training his prize pupil.
Neill threw rights and lefts in hard combinations, shifting his feet the way he's been taught to put extra power in his punches, and keeping him elusive against imagined counterattacks. The training was stretching on to its seventh hour for the day. Grant was an unforgiving taskmaster, but Neill was convinced that it was what was needed to be the best. And if he was going to continue to support his grandparents' farm back in Kansas, he needed to be the best.
Besides, he'd heard word of rustlers coming out this way. Neill didn't care much for guns, and muskets weren't very accurate anyway, but a strong man with courage could do a lot. Strength was never his shortcoming. When his grandparents' farm had struggled with the hard summers and long winters of his youth, as a boy, he'd taken to doing the work of three hands. When their ox had gone lame, he started pulling the plow himself. When they were offered a better sum to have him go west with the railroad. He'd been given a substantial sum for his work, mostly because he worked hours on end, and could bury a railroad spike with one hammerblow, hour after hour.
A man on one of the work trains had done better yet, discovering Neill's strength and endurance, and hiring him to prize fight with a traveling show. He hadn't cared for carney life - loose women and drunkards weren't his style at all, but for his grandparents, and hiring security for his hometown to help protect them from the rustlers and outlaws, he did it. That was all before he met Mr. Grant. After watching his one bout, an easy win against a 7' tall German, Grant had bought his contract and kept him in the far west, offering to train him himself - the first student Grant had ever taken.
Now, he was far happier. Sure, he wasn't entirely positive what his grandparents would think of him fighting for a living, but he was good at it, very good, and it was paying all of their bills readily enough. And when he wasn't training, he'd begun to think he might be able to do more good for the region.
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