149“WHAT YOU NEED, GENTLEMEN, IS A TRIFLE WIDER READIN’––JUSTA TRIFLE! FOR YOU AIN’T BEIN’ WELL POSTED ON FACTS!”
“WHAT YOU NEED, GENTLEMEN, IS A TRIFLE WIDER READIN’––JUSTA TRIFLE! FOR YOU AIN’T BEIN’ WELL POSTED ON FACTS!”
“An’ I reckon, too,” he went on deliberately, and there was a wicked fleer of sarcasm tinging the words, “I reckon I’ll hev to kinda apologize to you gentlemen for interruptin’ your evenin’s entertainment, as you might say. I’m sorry I ain’t able to remain, for it’s interestin’. I don’t know’s I’ve ever heard anything that was jest as excitin’ an’ thrillin’, but I’ve got something more important needin’ my attention this evenin’––meanin’ that I ain’t got nothin’ in particular that’s a-callin’ me! But it’s no more’n my plain duty for me to tell you this: You’d ought to follow the papers a mite closer from now on. It’s illuminatin’––it’s broadenin’! What you need, gentlemen, is a trifle wider readin’––jest a trifle––jest a trifle! For you ain’t bein’ well posted on facts!”
Nobody moved. Nobody was capable of stirring even. Old Jerry bowed to them from the doorway––he bowed till the water trickled in a stream from the brim of his battered hat.
And this time, as he passed out, he closed the door very gently behind him.
150CHAPTER XI
It would have been hard for her to have explained just why it was so, but Dryad Anderson had been sitting there in the unlighted front room of the little once-white cottage before Judge Maynard’s boxlike place on the hill, watching hour after hour for that light to blink out at her from the dark window of Denny Bolton’s house on the opposite slope. Ever since it had grown dark enough for that signal to be seen, which had called across to her so many nights, she had been waiting before the table in front of the window––waiting even while she told herself that it could not appear. It was not Saturday night; there was no real reason why she should be watching, unless––unless it was hope that held her there.
Only in the last few hours since twilight had she admitted to herself the possibility that such a hope lurked behind her vigil. Before then, when the thought had first come to her that Denny might cry out to her through the night, with that half-shuttered light, she had stifled it with a savageness that left her shaking, panting and dizzy from its bewildering intensity.
Time after time she told herself that it would go151unheeded by her, no matter how long or how insistently it beckoned, if by the hundredth chance it should flare up beyond the shadows, but as minutes dragged interminably by into equally interminable hours, the strained fierceness of that whispered promise grew less and less knifelike in its hardness––less and less assured.
Somehow, ever since the first light of that gray day had discovered her sitting there in almost the same position in which she now sat, eyes straining out across the valley, pointed chin cupped in her palms, that fearful, almost insane passion which had held each nerve and fiber of her taut as tight-stretched wire through the entire sleepless night, had begun to give way to something even less easy to endure.
All the terror which had checked her that evening when she swung the door open and stood poised on the threshold, a low laugh of sheerest delight in the costume she had worn across for him to see ready to burst from parted lips––all the horror that had held her incapable of motion until Denny had swung around and found her there, and lifted his arms and attempted to speak, had given way, in the first hours that followed, to a flaming scorn, a searing contempt for him and for his weakness that had lost him his fight.
All through that night which followed her panic flight from the huge, heavy-footed figure that had152groped out for her, called to her, and dropped asprawl her own small cloak in the doorway, Denny Bolton’s blood-soiled face and drunkenly reckless laugh had been with her, feeding that rage which scorched her eyes beneath their lids––that burned her throat and choked her.
Little drops of blood oozed out upon her lips––strangely brilliant crimson drops against that colorless background––where her teeth sank deep in the agony of disillusionment that made each pulse-beat a sledge-hammer blow within her brain. Her small palms were etched blue under the clenched fingers where the nails bit the flesh. And yet––and yet, for all the agony of it which made her lift her blanched face from time to time throughout the night––a face so terribly strained that it was almost distorted––and set her gasping chokingly that she hated him, hated him for a man who couldn’t fight and keep on fighting, even when the odds were great––when the light of that new, dreary day had come streaking in across her half-bowed head, something else began to take the place of all that bitterness and scorn.
And throughout the day she had still been struggling against it, struggling with all the tense fierceness of which her spirit was capable––her spirit that was far too big for the slim body that housed it. Yet that thought could not be shaken off. She couldn’t forget it, couldn’t wipe out the recollection153of that great, gaping wound that had dripped blood from his chin. She tried to close her eyes and shut it out as she went from task to task that day, and it would not fade.
Somehow it wasn’t that man at all whom she remembered as the afternoon dragged by to its close; it wasn’t the big-shouldered body nervelessly asprawl upon the floor that filled her memory. Instead a picture of an awkward, half-grown boy flashed up before her––a big, ungainly, terribly embarrassed boy who turned from watching the mad flight of a rabbit through the brush to smile at her reassuringly, even though his face was torn raw from her own nails.
That was the point at which the tide of her chaotic thoughts began to waver and turn. Long before she realized what she was doing she had fallen to wondering, with a solicitude that made moist and misty once more her tip-tilted eyes and softened the thin line of her lips, whether or not that bruise had been washed out, cleansed and cleanly bandaged.
When she did realize what that thought meant, it had been too long with her to be routed. She was too tired to combat it, anyway, too tired with the reaction of that long, throbbing night to do more than wonder at herself. Twilight came and the gray mist that had been over the hills for hours dissolved into rain. With the first hint of darkness that the storm brought with it she began to watch––to peer out154of the window whenever her busy footsteps carried her past it, at the bleak place across the hollow. Before it was fairly night she began to understand that she was not merely watching for the light, but hoping, praying wordlessly that it might shine. And when her work was finished she had taken her place there, her slim body in its scant black skirt and little white blouse hunched boyishly forward as always across the table.
Even that girl who, after the hours which had been almost cataclysmic for her, could scarcely have been expected to be able to comprehend it clearly yet––even she read the meaning of the slackened cords of her body, of her loosened lips and wet eyes. As long as she could she had fed the flame within her soul––fed it with every bitter thought and harsh judgment which her brain could evolve––and yet that flame had slackened and smouldered and finally died out entirely. Self-shame, self-scorn even, could not rekindle it.
Her lips were no longer white and straight and feverish with contempt; they were damp and full again, and curved and half-open with compassion. The ache was still there in her breast––a great gnawing pain which it seemed at that moment time could never remove, but it was no longer the wild hatred which made her pant with a desire to make him suffer, too, just as she had suffered that night through.155The pain was just as great, but it was pity now––only pity and an unaccountable yearning to draw that bruised face down against her and croon over it.
In spite of the numbness, in spite of the lassitude which that burnt-out passion had left behind in brain and body, she knew what it meant. She understood. She had hated his weakness; she still hated his lack of manhood which had made him fail her. That hatred would be a long time dying now––if it ever did perish. But she couldn’t hatehim! She looked that fact in the face, dumb at first at the awakening. She couldn’t hate him––not the man he was! There was a distinction––a difference very clear to her woman-brain. She could despise his cowardice; she could despise herself for caring still––but the caring still went on. Half-vaguely she realized it, but she knew the change had come. The girlishness was gone from it forever. She had to care now as a woman always cares––not for the thing he was, but in spite of it.
“I ought to hate him,” she told herself once, aloud. “I know I ought to hate him, and yet––and yet I don’t believe I can. Why, I––I can’t even hate myself, as I did a little while back, because I still care!”
It was a habit that had grown out of her long loneliness––those half-whispered conversations with herself. And now only one conviction remained. Again and again she told herself that she could not go156to meet him that night––could not go, even if he should call to her. And that, too, she put into whispered words.
“Even if he lights the window, I can’t––I couldn’t! Oh, not tonight! He won’t––he won’t think of it. But I couldn’t let him touch me––until––until I’ve had a little time to forget!”
But she was watching still––watching with small, gold-crowned head nodding heavily, eyes half-veiled with sinking lids––when that half-shaded window in the dark house glowed suddenly yellow with the light behind it. She was still hoping, praying dumbly that it might be, when Young Denny lifted the black-chimneyed lamp from its bracket on the kitchen wall that night, after he had stood and listened with a smile on his lips to Old Jerry’s hurried departure, and carried it into the front room which he scarcely ever entered except upon that errand.
At first she did not believe. She thought it was only a trick of her brain, so tired now that it was as little capable of connected thought as her worn-out body was of motion. Hardly breathing she stared until she saw the great blot of his body silhouetted against the pane for a moment as he crowded between the lamp, staring across at her, she knew.
She rose then, rose slowly and very cautiously as though she feared her slightest move might make it vanish. Young Denny’s bobbing lantern, swinging in157one hand as he crossed before the house and plunged into the thicket that lay between them, was all that convinced her––made her believe that she had seen aright.
“I can’t go––I can’t!” she breathed. And then, lifting her head, vehemently, as if he could hear:
“I want to––oh, you know I want to! But I can’t come to you tonight––not until I’ve had a little longer––to think.”
Almost before she had finished speaking another voice answered, a soft, dreamy voice that came so abruptly in the quiet house that it made her wheel like a startled wild thing. She had forgotten him for the time––that little, stooped figure at its bench in the back room workshop. For hours she had not given him a thought, and he had made not so much as a motion to make her remember his presence. She could not even remember when his sing-song, unending monologue had ceased, but she realized then that he had been more silent that night than ever before.
Earlier in the evening when she had lighted his lamp for him and set out his lump of moist clay, and helped him to his place on the high stool, she had thought to notice some difference in him.
Usually John Anderson was possessed of one or two unvarying moods. Either he plunged contentedly into his task of reproducing the multitude of small white figures around the walls, or else he merely sat158and stared up at her hopelessly, vacantly, until she put the clay herself into his hands. Tonight it had been different, for when she had placed the damp mass between his limp fingers he had laid it aside again, raised astonishingly clear eyes to hers and shaken his head.
“After a little––after a little while,” he had said. “I––I want to think a little first.”
It had amazed her for a moment. At any other time it would have frightened her, but tonight as she stroked his bowed head, she told herself that it was nothing more than a new vagary of his anchorless mind.
But that same strangely clear, almost sane glow which had puzzled her then was still there when she turned. It was even brighter than before, and the slow words which had startled her, for all their dreamy softness, seemed very sane as well.
“You have to go,” John Anderson answered her faltering, half-audible whisper. “You have to go––but you’ll be back soon. Oh, so soon! And I’ll be safe till you come!”
Dryad flashed forward a step, both hands half-raised to her throat as he spoke, almost believing that the miracle for which she had ceased even to hope had come that night. And then she understood––she knew that the bent figure which had already turned back to its bench had only repeated159her words, parrotlike; she knew that he had only pieced together a recollection of the absence which her vigil before the window had meant on a former occasion and repeated her own words of that other night.
And yet her brain clamored that there was more behind it all than mere witless repetition. John Anderson was smiling at her, too, smiling like a benevolent wraith. She saw that his pile of clay was still untouched, but there was no hint of petulant perplexity in his face, nothing of the terrified impotence which the inactivity of his fingers had always heralded before. He was just smiling––vaguely to be sure and a little uncertainly––but smiling in utter contentment and satisfaction, for all that.
Very slowly––wonderingly, she crossed to him and put both arms about his white head and drew it against her.
“I think you knew,” she said to him, unsteadily. “I think you are able to understand better than I can myself. And I know, too, now. I do have to go––I must go to him. But he need not even know, until I tell him some day––that I was with him tonight.”
The old man pulled away from her clasp, gently but very insistently. And he nodded––nodded as though he had understood. She paused and looked160back at him from the doorway, just as she had always hesitated. He was following her with his eyes. Again he shook his head, just as positively as he might have, had he been the man he might have been.
“Some day,” he reiterated, serenely, “some day! And she’ll know then––some day I’ll tell her––that I was with her tonight.”
She had forgotten the rain. It was coming down heavily, and it was dark, too––very, very dark. She stopped a while, as long as she dared, and waited with the rain beating cold upon her uncovered head and bare throat until her eyes saw the path a little more clearly. It took her a long time to feel her way forward that night. And even when she came within sight of Denny’s lantern, even when she was near enough to see him through the thicket ahead of her, in the little patch of light, she had not decided what she meant to do.
But with that first glimpse of him squatting there in the small cleared space it came to her what her course should be. She realized that if it was an impossibility for her to go to him, she could at least let him know she had been there––let him know that he had not been entirely alone while he waited. She even smiled to herself––smiled with wistful, half-sad, elfen tenderness as she, too, huddled down without a sound, there in the wet bushes opposite him, and decided how she would tell him.
161
Denny Bolton never quite knew how long he waited in the rain before he was certain that there was no use waiting longer. More than half the night had dragged by when he reached finally into the pockets of his coat and searched for a scrap of paper. Watching from her place in the thicket near him, she recognized the small white card which he discovered––she even reached out one hand instinctively for her invitation from the Judge, which she had told him had never arrived and for which she had hunted in vain throughout the following days.
With an unaccountable gladness because he knew straining at her throat, she watched him draw the lantern nearer and read again the words it bore before he turned it over and wrote, laboriously, with the thick pencil that he used to check logs back in the hills, some message across its back.
It was a message to her, she knew; and she knew, too, that he was going now. Deliberately she reached out then and found a rotten branch beside her. Young Denny’s head shot up as it cracked between her hands––shot swiftly erect while he stared hard at that wall of darkness which hid her. And swiftly as she fled, like some noiseless night creature of the woods, his sudden, plunging rush almost discovered her.
Back in the safety of the blackness she stood and162saw him bend over the place where she had been crouching; she saw him put his hand upon the patch of dead ferns which her body had crushed flat, and knew that he found it still warm. She even held up her face, as though she were giving him her lips––she reached out her arms to him––when she saw him rise from an examination of her foot-prints in the mold, smiling his slow, infinitely grave smile as he nodded his head over what he had seen.
Back over the path she had come she followed the dancing point of his lantern, sometimes almost upon him, sometimes lagging far behind when he stopped and strained his ears for her. All recollection of the night before was gone from her mind, wiped out as utterly as though it had never existed. Nothing but a great gladness possessed her, a joy that amounted almost to mischievous glee whenever he stood still a moment and listened.
Not until she had waited many minutes after he stooped and slipped the card beneath the door did she come out from the cover of the woods. But she raced forward madly then, and flung the door open, and stooped for it where it lay white against the floor.
All the mischievous glee went from her face in that next moment. Bit by bit it faded before the advance of that same strained whiteness that had marred it, hours before. All the wistfulness that163made her face so childlike, all the hunger that made the hurt in her breast came back while she read, over and over, the words which Denny had written for her across the back of her card, until she could repeat them without looking at it. And even then she only half-understood what they meant. Once she opened the door and peered out into the blackness, searching for the lantern that had disappeared.
“Why––why he’s gone! He came to tell me that he was going away,” she murmured, dully. And then, still more dully:
“And I didn’t tell him I was sorry. I’ve let him go without even telling him how sorry I was––for the hurt upon his chin!”
Perhaps it was the silence that made her turn; perhaps she simply turned with no thought or reason at all, but she faced slowly about at that moment, just in time to see John Anderson nod and smile happily at something he alone could see––just in time to hear him sigh softly once, before his arms went slack upon his work-bench and his head drooped forward above them.
The bit of a card fluttered to the floor as both her tight-clenched fists lifted toward her throat. The softest of pitying little moans came quavering from her lips. She needed no explanation of what that suddenly limp body meant! And she understood better now, too, that untouched lump of clay upon164the boards beside his bowed head. John Anderson’s long task was finished. He had known it was finished, and had been merely resting tonight––resting content before he started upon that long journey, before he followed that face, tumbled of hair and uplifted of lip, which seemed always to be calling to him.
The slim-bodied girl whose face was so like what that other woman’s face had been went slowly across to him where he sat. After a while she slipped her arm about his wasted shoulders, just as she had done so often on other nights. A racking sob shook her when she first tried to speak––and she tried again.
“You kept faith, didn’t you, dear?” she whispered to him. “Oh, but you kept faith with her––right––right up to the end. Please God––please God, I may get my chance back again––to try to keep it, too. You’ve gone to her––and––and I’m glad! You waited a long time, dear, and you were very patient. But, oh, you’ve left me––you’ve left me all alone!”
The tears came then. Great, searing drops that had been hopelessly dammed back the night before rolled down her thin cheeks. She stooped and touched the silvered head with her lips before she groped her way into the other room and found her chair at the table.
“He knew I was there with him,” she tried to165whisper. “He knew I was, I know! But I wish I could tell him I’m sorry. Oh, I wish I could!”
And Old Jerry found her so, head pillowed upon her outstretched arms, her hair in a marvelous shimmering mass across her little shoulders when he came the next morning, almost before the day was fairly begun, to tell her all the things there were for him to tell.
166CHAPTER XII
Monday morning was always a busy morning in Jesse Hogarty’s Fourteenth Street gymnasium; busy, that is to say, along about that hour when morning was almost ready to slip into early afternoon. The reason for this late activity was very easy to understand, too, once one realized that Hogarty’s clientele––especially that of his Monday mornings––was composed quite entirely of that type of leisurely young man who rarely pointed the nose of his tub-seated raceabout below Forty-second Street, except for the benefits of a few rather desultory rounds under Hogarty’s tutelage, a shocking plunge beneath an icy shower, and the all pervading sense of physical well-being resultant upon a half hour’s kneading of none too firm muscles on the marble slabs.
It was like Jesse Hogarty––or Flash Hogarty, as he had been styled by the sporting reporters of the saffron dailies ten years back, when it was said that he could hit faster and harder out of a clinch than any lightweight who ever stood in canvas shoes––to refuse to transfer his place to some locality a bit nearer Fifty-seventh Street, even when it chanced,167as it did with every passing year, that he drew his patrons––at an alarmingly high rate per patron––almost entirely from far uptown.
“This isn’t a turkish bath,” Flash Hogarty was accustomed to answer such importunities. “If you are just looking for a place to boil out the poison, hunt around a little––take a wide-eyed look or two! There are lots and lots of them. This isn’t a turkish bath; it’s a gymnasium––aman’sgymnasium!”
That was his invariable formula, alike to the objections of the youthful, unlimited-of-allowance, more or less hard-living sons that it “spoils the best part of the week, you know, Flash, just running ’way down here,” and the equally earnest and far more peevish complaints of the ticker tired, just-a-minute-to-spare fathers that it cost them about five thousand, just to take an hour to work off a few pounds.
But they kept on coming, in spite of their lack of time and Hogarty’s calm refusal to consider their arguments––some of the younger men because they really did appreciate the sensation of flexible muscles sliding beneath a smooth skin, some of them merely because they liked to hear Hogarty’s fluently picturesque profanity, always couched in the most delightfully modulated of English, when the activity of a particularly giddy week-end brought them back a little too shaky of hand, a little too brilliant of eye and a trifle jumpy as to pulse. Hogarty had a way168of telling them just how little they actually amounted to, which, no matter how wickedly it cut, never failed to amuse them.
The older generation dared do nothing else, even in the face of the ex-lightweight’s scathingly sarcastic admiration of their constantly increasing waist-line––or lack of one. For their lines were largely a series of curves exactly opposite to those on which Nature had originally designed them.
They continued to come; they ran down-town in closed town cars, padded heavily across the sidewalk like sad bovines going to the slaughter, to reappear an hour or two later stepping like three-year-olds, serenely, virtuously joyous at the tale of the scales which indicated a five-pound loss. And the Saturday and Sunday week-end out of town which presently followed, with the astoundingly heavy dinners that accompanied it, brought them back in a week, sadder even than before.
Monday morning was always a very busy morning in Hogarty’s––but never until along about noon. And because he knew how infallible were the habits of his patrons, Hogarty did not so much as lift his eyes to the practically empty gymnasium floor when a clock at the far side of the room tinkled the hour of eleven. The two boys who were busily scrubbing with waxing-mops the floor that already glistened like the unruffled surface of some crystal pool were quite as169unconcerned at the lack of activity as was their employer. They merely paused long enough to draw one shirt sleeve across the sweat-beaded foreheads––it was a very early spring in Manhattan and the first heat was hard to bear––and went at their task harder than ever.
Hogarty had one other reason that morning which accounted for his absolute serenity. From Third Avenue to the waterfront any one who was well-informed at all––and there was no one who had not at least heard whispers of his fame––knew that the thin-faced, hard-eyed, steel-sinewed ex-lightweight who dressed in almost funeral black and white and talked in the hushed, measured syllables of a professor of English, loved one thing even more than he loved to see his own man put over the winning punch in––say the tenth. It was common gossip that a set of ivory dominoes came first before all else.
No man had ever ventured to interrupt twice the breathless interest with which Hogarty was accustomed to play his game. It did not promise to be safe––a second interruption. And Hogarty was playing dominoes this particular Monday morning, at a little round, green-topped table against the wall opposite the door, peering stealthily at the upturning face of each piece of a newly dealt hand, when the clock struck off that hour. But if Hogarty was oblivious to everything but the game, his opponent170was far from being in that much to be envied state. Bobby Ogden yawned––yawned from sheer ennui––although he tried to hide that indication of his boredom behind a perfectly manicured hand, while he scowled at the dial.
Ogden was one of the Monday morning regulars––one of the crowd which usually arrived in a visibly taut-nerved condition at an entirely irregular and undependable hour. An attack of malignant malaria, contracted on a prolonged ’gator hunt in the Glades, coupled with the equally malignant orders of his physician, alone accounted for his presence there at that unheard of o’clock.
There were purplish semi-circles still painfully too vivid beneath his eyes; his pallor was still tinged with an ivory-like shade of yellow. And he fidgeted constantly in the face of Hogarty’s happy deliberation, stretching his heliotrope silk-clad arms and tapping flat, heel-less rubber-soled shoes on the floor beneath the table in a fashion that would have irritated any but the blandly unconscious man across the table from him to a state of violence.
Ogden’s quite perfectly lined features were smooth with the smoothness of twenty years or so. His lack of stability and poise belonged also to that age and to a physique that managed to tilt the scale beam at one hundred and eighteen––that is, unless he had been forgetting rather more rashly than usual that171liquids were less sustaining than solids, when one hundred and ten was about the figure.
He was playing poorly that morning––playing inattentively––with his eyes always waiting for the hands to indicate that hour which was most likely to herald the arrival of the advance guard of the crowd of regulars. Hogarty himself, after a time, began to feel, vaguely, his uneasiness and lack of application to the matter in hand, and made evident his irritation by even longer pauses before each play. He liked a semblance of opposition at least, and he lifted his head, scowling a little at Ogden’s last, most flagrant blunder, to find that his antagonist had moved without so much as looking at the piece he had slipped into position.
The boy wasn’t looking at the table at all. He sat twisted about in his chair, staring wide-eyed at the figure that had pushed open the street door and was now surveying the whole room with an astonishingly calm attention to detail. Ogden was staring, oblivious to everything else, and with real cause, for the figure that had hesitated on the threshold was like no other that had ever drifted into Hogarty’s place before. His shoulders seemed fairly to fill the door-frame, for all that bigger men than he was had stood on that same spot and gone unnoticed because of size alone. And his waist appeared almost slender, and his hips very flat, merely from contrast172with all that weight which he carried high in his chest.
But it was not the possibilities of the newcomer’s body that held Ogden’s fascinated attention. In point of fact, he did not notice that at all, until some time later. Denny Bolton’s long, tanned face was entirely grave––even graver than usual. Just a hint of wistfulness that would never quite leave them showed in his eyes and lurked in the line of his lips––an intangible, fleeting suggestion of expectation that had waited patiently for something that had been very long in the coming. And the black felt hat and smooth black suit which he wore finished the picture and made the illusion complete. His face and figure, even there in the doorway of Hogarty’s Fourteenth Street place, could have suggested but one thing to an observant man. He might have been a composite of all the New England Pilgrim Fathers who had ever braved a rock-bound coast.
And Bobby Ogden was observing. Utterly unconscious of Hogarty’s threatening storm of protest, he sat and gazed and gazed, scarcely crediting his own eyes. Domino poised in hand, Hogarty had turned in preoccupied resignation back to a perplexed contemplation of whether it would be better to play a blank-six and block the game or a double-blank and risk being caught with a handful of high counters, when Ogden reached out and clutched him by the wrist.
173
“Shades of Miles Standish!” that silk-shirted person gasped. “In the name of the Mayflower and John Alden, and hallowed Plymouth Rock, look, Flash, look! For the love o’ Mike look, before he moves and spoils the tableau!”
Hogarty lifted his head and looked.
Denny Bolton’s eyes had returned from their deliberate excursion about the gymnasium just in time to meet halfway that utterly impersonal scrutiny. For a long moment or two that mutual inspection endured; then the boy’s lips moved––open with a smile that was far graver than his gravity had been––and he started slowly across the floor toward the table. Hogarty half rose, one hand outstretched as if to halt him, but for some reason which the ex-lightweight scarcely understood himself, he failed to utter the protest that was at his tongue’s end. And Young Denny continued to advance––continued, and left in the rear a neatly defined trail where the heavy nails of his shoes marred the sacred sheen of that floor.
Within arm’s reach of the table he stopped, his eyes flitting questioningly from Hogarty’s totally inscrutable face to the tense interest and enjoyment in Bobby Ogden’s features, and back again. Hogarty’s hard eyes could be very hard––hard and chilling as chipped steel––and they were that now. He was only just beginning to awake to a realization of that profaned floor, but the smile upon Denny’s mouth174neither disappeared nor stiffened in embarrassment before that forbidding countenance. Instead he held out his hand––a big, long-fingered, hard-palmed hand––toward the ex-lightweight proprietor. And when he began to speak there was nothing but simple interrogation in the almost ponderous voice.
“I––I reckon,” he said slowly, “that you must be Jesse Hogarty––Mr. Jesse Hogarty?”
Flash Hogarty looked at him, looked at that outstretched hand––looked back at his steady eyes and the smile that parted his lips. And Hogarty did a thing that made even Bobby Ogden gasp. He bowed gracefully and reached out and silently shook hands. When he spoke, instead of the perfectly enunciated, picturesquely profane rebuke which the silk-shirted boy was waiting to hear, his voice was even smoother and softer, and choicer of intonation than usual.
“Quite so,” he stated. “Quite free from error or embarrassing mistake, sir. I am Mr. Jesse Hogarty. You, however, if I may be permitted that assertion, have me rather at a disadvantage, sir.”
He bowed again, once more elaborately graceful. Bobby Ogden hugged his knees beneath the table, for he knew from the very suavity of that reply all that was brewing. Hogarty’s silken voice went on.
“Regrettable, sir, and most awkward. You, no doubt, have no objection, however, to making the introduction complete?”
175
The smile still hovered upon Denny’s lips. Ogden noted, though, that it had changed. And he realized, too, that it had not been a particularly mirthful smile, even in the first place. Again Young Denny’s eyes met those of the other boy for one moment.
“I’m Denny Bolton,” he replied just as deliberately. “Denny Bolton, from Boltonwood––or––or I reckon you’ve never heard of that place. I’m down from the hill country, back in the north,” he supplemented.
Hogarty turned away––turned back to the green-topped table and played the double-blank with delicate precision.
“Of course,” he agreed softly. “Quite right––quite right! And––er––may I inquire if it was something of importance––something directly concerning me––which has resulted in this neighborly call?”
He did not so much as lift his eyes from the dominoes beneath his fingers. If he had he would have seen, as Ogden saw, that Denny’s smile faded away––disappeared entirely. But when he replied the boy’s voice was unchanged.
“I don’t know’s it’s particularly important to you,” he answered. “That’s what I came down for––to see. I was directed––back a day or two I was told that maybe if I looked you up you’d have some opening for me, down here. I was told you were looking for a––a good heavyweight fighter!”
176
Bobby Ogden threw back his head to laugh. And instead he just sat there with his mouth wide open, waiting. He felt sure that there was a better moment coming. Hogarty fiddled with the dominoes and seemed to be considering that information with due deliberation and from every angle.
“I see,” he murmured at last. “Surely. Quite right––quite right! And I may, I believe, safely assure you that I have several fine openings in the establishment for young men––for just the right sort of young men, of course. May I––er––inquire if you wish employment by the––er––week, or just in your spare time, to put it so?”
The question was icily sarcastic. Denny’s answer came sharp upon its heels. His voice was just as measured, just as inflectionless as Hogarty’s had been.
“If you hire them here by the week,” he said, “or for their spare time, I––I reckon I’ve come to the wrong establishment. I was only asking you for a chance to show you whether I was any good or not. I was told you’d be just as interested to find out as I was myself. Maybe––maybe I’ve made a bad mistake!”
Bobby Ogden was sorry he had waited to laugh. There was a hardness in the big-shouldered figure’s words that he did not like; a directly simple, unmistakable rebuke for the sneer concealed in Hogarty’s177question that could not be misinterpreted. And something utterly bad flared up in the lean-faced black-clad proprietor’s eyes––something of enmity that seemed to Ogden all out of proportion with the provocation. All the smooth suavity disappeared from his speech just as chalk marks are wiped out by a wet sponge. And Hogarty came swiftly to his feet.
“Maybe you were––maybe you did make a bad mistake!” he rasped out in a dead, colorless monotone that scarcely moved his lips. “But no man ever came into this place yet, and went out again to say he didn’t get his chance. I know a few specimens who make a profession of pleading that. They’re quitters––and they assay a streak of yellow that isn’t pay dirt!”
His voice dropped in register. It just missed being hoarse. With a rapidity that was almost bewildering he began to give orders to the two boys who were still phlegmatically waxing the floor. And the English-professor intonation was gone entirely.
“You, Joe!” he called, “get out the rods; set ’em up and rope her off! Legs, you chase out and find Sutton, if he’s not in back. You’ll run into him at Sharp’s, most likely. Tell him to come a-running. Tell him a new one’s drifted in from the frontier––and thinks he needs to be shown. Move, you shrimp!”
Before he had finished speaking he had started178toward the locker rooms at the rear. Denny he ignored as though he did not exist. He went without a sound in his rubber-soled shoes. Bobby Ogden, waking suddenly from his trancelike condition, leaped to his feet and ran after him. Hogarty halted at the pressure of the boy’s pink-nailed fingers on his arm and wheeled to show a face that was startlingly white and strained.
“Why, you great big kid!” Bobby Ogden flung at him. “You big infant! You’re really sore! Don’t you know he didn’t mean anything. He’s only a kid himself––and you egged him into it!”
“Is he?”
From that gently rising inflection alone Ogden knew that interference was absolutely hopeless.
“Is he? Well, he’s old enough to seem to know what he wants. And he’s going to get it––see? He’s going to get it––and––get––it––good! No man ever flung it into my face that I didn’t give him a chance––not and got away with it.”
Hogarty glanced meaningly down at the restraining hand upon his sleeve and Ogden removed it hastily. He stood in dismayed indecision until the ex-lightweight had disappeared before he turned toward Young Denny, who had been watching in silence his effort at intervention. Denny had not moved. Ogden’s almost girlishly modeled face was more than apprehensive as he stepped up to him.
179
“He’s mad,” he stated flatly. “You’ve got him peeved for keeps. And I guess you’ve let yourself in for quite a merry little session, too, unless––unless”––he hesitated, peering curiously in Denny’s grave face, “unless you want to make a nice quiet little exit before he comes back with Sutton. You can, you know, and––and it may save you quite a little––er––discomfort in the long run. Sutton––well, the least I can say of Sutton is that he’s inclined to be a trifle rough!”
Ogden saw that slow smile returning; he saw it start far back in the steady eyes and spread until it touched the corners of the other boy’s lips again.
“You mean––leave?” Young Denny asked.
Ogden nodded significantly.
“That’s just what I do mean––only a great deal more so!”
“But I––I couldn’t very well do that now––could I?”
The silk-shirted shoulders shrugged hopelessly.
“Well, since you ask me,” he said, “judging from what I’ve already seen of your methods, I––I’d say most emphatically no. I’ve done all I can when I advise you that now is the one best hour to make your getaway. It wouldn’t be exactly a glorious retreat from the field, but it wouldn’t be so painful, either. Just remember that, will you? I’m to fit you out with some fighting togs, I suppose, if you’ll just come along.”
180
He turned to follow in the direction which Hogarty had taken, and then paused once more.
“Beg pardon for the omission, Mr. Bolton,” he added, and he smiled boyishly. “My name’s Ogden––Bobby Ogden. Glad to become acquainted with you, I’m sure. And now, if you will follow on, I’ll do my best for you. Would you mind walking on your toes? You see, there are just two things most calculated to get Flash’s goat. One of ’em’s marring up his floor with heavy boots, and the other is butting in when he’s playing dominoes. You couldn’t have known it, of course, but he can’t stand for either of them. And together I am afraid they have got you in pretty bad. You’re sure you can’t swallow your pride, and just beat it quietly while the chance is nice and handy? Maybe you ought to think of your family––no?”
Denny’s smile widened. He shook his head in refusal. He knew he was going to like Ogden––like him for the same reason that he had liked the fat, brown-clad newspaper man in Boltonwood––because of the charming equality of his attitude and the frankness in his eyes.
“No,” he decided, “I––I’m afraid I can’t. I didn’t mean to stir him up so, either, only––only I thought, just for a minute or two, that he was laughing at me. I think I’d rather stay and see it out. But you mustn’t worry about me––I wouldn’t if I were you.”
181
Again Ogden shrugged resignedly. On tiptoe Denny followed him to the locker-rooms in the rear, and at a word of direction began to remove his clothes. While he plunged head-foremost into a bin in search for a pair of white trunks, Ogden kept up a steady stream of advice calculated to save the other at least a small percentage of punishment.
“Sutton’s big,” he exclaimed jerkily, head out of sight, “but he isn’t fast on his feet. That’s why they call him Boots. He steps around as though he had on waders––hip-high ones. But he’s lightning hitting from close in––in-fighting they call it––where most big fighters don’t shine. That’s because he’s had Flash’s coaching. You want to keep away from him––keep him at arm’s length, and maybe he won’t do too much harm. I––I’d let him do all the leading, if I were you, and––and kind of run ahead of him.” The voice came half-smothered from the cluttered bin of equipment. “That isn’t running away from him because you’re afraid, you understand. It’s just playing him to tire him out, you know!”
It was silent for a moment while Bobby Ogden burrowed for the necessary canvas shoes. Then a hushed laugh broke that quiet and brought the latter bolt upright. With the trunks in one hand and the rubber-soled slippers in the other, Ogden stood and stared, only half understanding that the big boy before him was laughing at him for his182solicitude and trying to reassure him with that same mirth.
“Funny, is it?” he snorted aggrievedly. “So very––very––funny? Well, I only hope you’ll be able to laugh that way again––say even in a month or two!”
“I wasn’t laughing at you,” Young Denny told him soberly. “I––I was just thinking how strange it seemed to have somebody worried over me––worried because they were afraid I might get hurt. Most little mix-ups I’ve gone into have worried folks––lest I wouldn’t.”