Free Cockfighter

but I could see that there was mail inside the box through the dirty brown glass window. I searched through my wallet, found my receipt for the rental, and shoved it through the window to the clerk. He studied the slip for a moment, and called my attention to the date.
    â€œYou’re almost ten days overdue on your quarterly box payment, Mr. Mansfield,” he said. “Your box was closed out and rented to somebody else. I’m sorry, but there’s a big demand for boxes these days and I don’t have any more open at present. If you want me to, I’ll put your name on the waiting list.”
    I shook my head and pointed to the rack of mail behind him. This puzzled him for a moment, and then he said: “Oh, you mean your mail?”
    I nodded impatiently, drumming my fingers on the marble ledge.
    â€œIf you have any, it’ll be at the general delivery window.”
    I picked up my receipt and gave it to the woman at the general delivery window. She handed me two letters and my current Southern Cockfighter magazine. I shoved the letters and magazine into my coat pocket and filled in change-of-address cards to transfer the magazine and post-office-box letters to my Ocala address. After mailing one card to the magazine and turning in the other to the woman at the window I returned to my hotel room.
    The first letter I opened was from a pit operator in Tallahassee inviting me to enter a four-cock derby he was holding in November. I tossed the letter into the wastebasket. The other letter was the one I had been expecting. It was from the Southern Conference Tournament committee, and contained my invitation, the rules, and the schedule for the S.C.T. season.
    I studied the mimeographed schedule, but I wasn’t too happy about it. There wasn’t a whole lot of time to obtain and keep gamecocks for the tourney.
    SCHEDULE
Southern Conference
    Oct. 15 —Greenville, Mississippi
    Nov. 10 —Tifton, Georgia
    Nov. 30 —Plant City, Florida
    Dec. 15 —Chattanooga, Tennessee
    Jan. 10 —Biloxi, Mississippi
    Jan. 28 —Auburn, Alabama
    Feb. 24 —Ocala, Florida
    Mar. 15-16 —S.C.T.—Milledgeville, Georgia
    I was already too late for Greenville, Mississippi. The S.C.T. was unlike other invitational mains and derbies, both in rules and gamecock standards. When Senator Foxhall had organized the S.C.T. back in the early thirties, his primary purpose had been to improve the breeds and gameness in southern cockfighting. The hardest rule of the tourney was that all the cocks entered in the final round at Milledgeville had to be four-time winners. A cock can win one or sometimes two fights with flashy flies on the first pitting, and some good luck. But any cock that wins four in a row is dead game. Luck simply doesn’t stretch through four wins. This single S.C.T. rule, more than any other, had certainly raised breeding standards in the South, and it kept out undesirables and fly-by-night cockers looking for a fast dollar. All the pit operators on the S.C.T. circuit were checked from time to time by members of the committee, and if their standards of operation dropped, they were dropped, in turn, by the senator.
    Like the other big-time chicken men, I had fought cocks in the highly competitive six-day International Tournament in both Orlando and Saint Pete, and I intended to enter it again someday, but I preferred the more rigid policies of the S.C.T. It was possible to enter the annual International Tournament by posting a preliminary two-hundred-dollar forfeit, which was lost if you didn’t show up and pay the three-hundred-dollar balance. The winning entries made big money at the International, but I could make just as much at S.C.T. pits and the final Milledgeville meet. And the wins on the S.C.T. circuit really meant something to me.
    At that moment, however, I didn’t feel like a big time cockfighter. I was at rock bottom and it was ironical to even think about fighting