II
He pulled on his overcoat, which was built out at the shoulders until it gave Paul still another of Jack Dempsey's dimensions. He adjusted it until he was as wide on one side as on the other, pulled out his cravat until it bowed, slanted his velour hat over one eye, and strode from the store. He strode; Paul's self-respect depended on his clothes. He never strode in a bathing-suit. When he was in a bathing-suit he sidled, and walked modestly, and even somewhat slinkingly, feeling distressingly naked. But now he strode, swinging his wide shoulders, and looking the world in the eye to stare it down.
He went over to the Belvedere—continuous, eleven to eleven, fifteen cents for the best seat in the house.
He had a crush on the young lady cashier of the Belvedere, who sat in a box in the middle of the foyer from eleven to eleven with intervals out, and worked an apparatus which caused tickets to sprout in the slab before her as often as she was paid fifteen cents. Her single eye to his fifteen cents had titivated Paul's interest; as she could gaze upon him without excitement he thought she must be a very superior person. She had a share in securing his steady custom for the Belvedere.
"It'll be a nice day, if it don't rain," he said to her, and smiled fascinatingly.
She made an assenting noise through her broad, common sense nose, and did her trick with the apparatus.
"It'll be a long day, if it don't shrink!" he tried again, with a fixed grin. Paul could not afford a vaudeville show more than twice per week, and he tried to remember the jokes.
She looked up at him with a slight contraction of her brows. "I beg your pardon?" she said.
Paul leaned on the slab, and twisted his mouth sideways to spring the gag again; he felt that he had her going, at least a little.
"Shake it up!" called an impatient patron from the line.
Paul turned his shoulders slowly about, and surveyed the line, and knitted his black brows at a little man whose eyes were as innocent and timorous as a rabbit's.
"Are you in a hurry?" he asked in a bass voice.
"No!" exclaimed the little man.
"Then don't try to hurry me!" said Paul, swinging his shoulders back again, and letting his heavy frown rest on the young lady cashier for a moment, so that she might see what kind of a man he was.
He came out of the Belvedere at half-past five. His face was flushed from generous emotion and bad air, and his eyes were glassy from protracted staring at "Black Roger of Brimstone Gulch." An intending patron was talking to the young lady cashier.
"I say I give you a two!" shouted the patron.
"It was a one," said the cashier patiently."Take your change, please. There's the dollar you gave me."
"That's a dollar fast enough," said the patron, "but it ain't the dollar I give you, because I didn't give you no dollar. I give you a two!"
"Do you want your dollar back?"
The patron, a short and dark-faced young man, drew back, lifted his shoulders, sighed noisily, and uttered an oath. It was not a very gross imprecation—he recognized that he was talking to a lady, and the rather suave way in which he swore almost robbed the utterance of offence.
"Here!" called Paul. "How dare you use language to a lady?"
"Is that so?" breathed the patron, turning.
Paul Manley narrowed his eyes and looked very bleakly at the low-set young man. "You heard me," he said.
"Wait a minute, lady," said the patron, waving a hand behind him as he lurched toward Paul. "Just wait a minute. Listen, fellow, what are you butting in for? Do you want a good smack in the nose?"
"Well, that's no way to talk to a girl," said Paul, weakening.
"Then I'll talk to you the same way!" He crowded up against Paul and shoved him back against the wall of the foyer. "Come on, you big cake-eater, and put up your hands! So you're working with her, are you?"
"Knock the big stiff out, Jimmy!" yelled a comrade joyfully.
"She's nothing to me," mumbled Paul, his bluff caving completely. "On the level, she isn't! Don't hit me. I didn't mean anything—honest, I didn't!"
"You're a liar," snarled Jimmy, roused to fury by the prospect of an easy victory. With sound military instinct he swung his fist for Paul's jaw, leaping forward and pivoting with the blow.
"Cheese it, Jimmy!" yelled his ally. "She's coming out!"
The young lady cashier had blown her police whistle and had flung open the door of her cage. She had evidently a reputation for peace-keeping, for Jimmy, who was tearing at Paul like a wolf at a sheep, now bent forward and hunched his shoulders toward his ears and ran off. Paul had crouched and covered up, and had taken the weight of his vicious blow on the forearm, but it had staggered him, and shaken his velour hat over his nose and dislocated the shoulders of his overcoat.
"Let me alone!" he yelled, when he felt her hand on his arm.
"He's gone," she said.
He straightened, coughed, and shook himself into order. She was gazing at him soberly, understandingly, and yet with an effect of admiring him.
"You're terribly hot-tempered, aren't you?" she said.
"That fellow was enough to make anybody mad."
"It was nice of you to take my part," she said. "I'm awfully obliged. As a usual thing I blow my whistle and get the policeman; there aren't many fellows will step up and take a girl's part, like you!"
"Well," said Paul, in a deeper and more assured tone, "that's the kind of man I am, I guess! I always stand up for a lady!"
"It was very brave of you. You're all right now, aren't you?"
"You bet I'm all right. Lucky for him he took me unawares. Why, say, I could work around him like a copper around a barrel!"
"I bet," she said. And she smiled at him again, nodded, and skipped back into her box.
Restored to his own good opinion by her deftness, Paul swaggered back to Hepp's Bargain Basement. He knew that she had seen the episode, and that she could not have misinterpreted it; but still he had not lost face.
Hepp was waiting for him. "Where were you the last two hours?"
"Aw, I wasn't feeling right."
Hepp, a short and big-bellied man with a pink and shining head, compressed his lips. "Look here, Manley, did you make this sale?"
"Yes," said Paul, glancing at the sales-slip. "That's some of my work, Mr. Hepp!"
"I might have recognized it. You sold this pair of shoes to a colored fellow, and he left his old shoes to be sent home. Well, he was in here just now, raising Cain, and threatening to cutme. You sent him a pair of ladies' dancing pumps in the box instead of his shoes, and he says he forgot the ten dollar bill that he had hidden in his old shoe. And he wanted it!"
"Aw, he's a liar!"
"Maybe so, but I was in no position to argue. Here's two dollars."
"What for? Thank you, Mr. Hepp!"
"For your pay up to tonight—twelve dollars, less the ten that I had to give to the colored fellow. Manley, you've got too much brains for the shoe business. You've got too much on your mind besides selling shoes. So we're going to part company. Keep your hat and coat on."
"You want me to quit?"
"Exactly," said Hepp, walking away. "Good luck, and good-by!"
"Then I'll quit!" shouted Paul indignantly. "I'll quit right here and now! Say, Hepp, I want to tell you a few. The matter with you is you don't know how to treat a white man. You're a blamed old slave-driver, that's what you are! You're a mean, stingy old tight-wad! Where do you get that stuff—trying to fire me? Why, say, you old dumb-bell, I forgot more about the shoe business than you ever knew! I got too much brains for you—that's what's the matter. What do you know, anyhow? Put your hat on, you old fool—you're half-naked!"
He left the store hurriedly, and ran to the street. He had not had time to remember all the gags which he had saved up in loving anticipation of just this occasion, but he felt he had done pretty well.
"I guess I told him where he got off!" he jubilated.