Joe Fleming has promised his girl he will leave the ring after one last fight, and she asks to watch it - from behind a curtain, at ringside. London had been an oyster pirate, a hobo, a seal hunter and a prospector before twenty-four; he reported prizefights for the papers, and this short 1905 novel is the most exact account of what happens inside twenty feet of rope in American literature. Fifty-eight plates by painters including Thomas Eakins and Henri Matisse, spanning 1825 to 1925, trace the closed rooms and watching figures that frame this story of a fight seen from ringside.