XIII
Thenext morning at breakfast, with the midnight reaction still daggering him, Philip was shamefacedly reticent until after he found that Bromley, charitably or otherwise, was completely ignoring the Corinthian episode. Though he was far from being capable of banishing it himself, he contrived to push it aside sufficiently to enable him to carry his part in the table talk.
“No, I hadn’t thought of camping down in a hotel,” was his reply to Bromley’s question as to his plans for the summer. “Comfortable as this place is, it isn’t quite my idea of living: too monotonous. What I’m thinking of is a bachelor apartment in one of the down-town buildings, with meals wherever the eating is best; something of that sort for the present, at least. How about you?”
“To tell the truth, I haven’t been thinking much more than a minute or so ahead,” the play-boy confessed, with his disarming smile at its attractive best. “This sudden cataracting of filthy lucre has a tendency to make me lightheaded—that is, more lightheaded than usual, which you will say is gilding the lily. I did have some vague notion of taking a trip back home and astonishing the natives. It would astonish them, you know.”
“To see you back again?”
“To see me come back with money in my purse—and more of it to follow. They’d think the world was coming to an end. But, on second thought, I guess it wouldn’t do. I shouldn’t care to give any of them heart failure.”
“But if you don’t go home?” Philip queried.
“In that event your bachelor apartment idea has an irresistible appeal. Unless you particularly long for complete solitude, I’d be glad to join you. Say a couple of bed-rooms, a bath and perhaps a common sitting-room?”
“Done,” said Philip shortly. “What next?”
“For me?—oh, confound your picture! You are bound and determined to make me think more than one day ahead, in spite of everything, aren’t you? All right, if I must. After we are settled, perhaps I shall look around and try to find some safe investment niches into which I can dribble my share of the golden showers from the ‘Little Jean’ as they come in.”
“Good. That is the most sensible thing I’ve heard you say in a week of Sundays!” said the one in whom the reaction to the New England normalities had by this time wrought its perfect work.
“And the least expected, you would add—if you were not too soft-hearted. That, too, is all right; I wasn’t expecting it myself. Nothing has ever been farther from my promptings heretofore, I can solemnly assure you.”
Philip became banal. “It is never too late to mend. I’ve been hoping——”
“You mustn’t hope too violently, Philip mine. I am a creature of impulse, and just now the spirit movesme to become a money grubber; to hang on to what I have, and to plant it and watch it grow like Jack’s beanstalk. Past that, the same spirit is moving me to get acquainted with some really good people; if there be any such in this infatuated town.”
“Don’t be snobbish. There are plenty of them, no doubt.”
“You don’t happen to know any of them yourself, do you?”
“Not socially; I wasn’t here long enough last spring to go about any, though I did meet some of the solider citizens in the railroad connection: Governor Evans, ‘Uncle Johnny’ Smith,—he owns the American House, you know,—Colonel Eicholtz, Mr. Walter Cheesman, the Barth brothers, Kountze, president of the Colorado National; men like that, most of them old residents.”
“The ‘First Families,’” Bromley mused. “Of course there would be some dating back to the ’sixties and the ox-team and ‘Pike’s-Peak-or-bust’ days; not so very ancient, at that, but still with the distinguishing hallmark of the pioneers. We’ll fish around for some introductions.”
Philip sat back in his chair, shaking his head.
“I’m not at all sure that I want to go in for the social whirl just yet, Harry,” he deprecated. “I want to find the Dabneys first, if I can; and after that ... perhaps you may remember that I once told you what my principal object was in heading for the west?”
“About your father; yes, I remember. You said at the time that you had no definite clue to his whereabouts. Has anything come to light since?”
“No; nothing.”
“Going to be a rather blind job, looking for him, isn’t it?”
“Utterly blind. It will be only by chance, if I find him.”
“Any notion of how to go about the search?”
“No very clear idea, as yet. But now that I have money and leisure—can go where I please and stay as long as I please—well, to begin with, I had thought of making a round of the different towns and mining-camps. Of course, I’m not at all certain that he is in Colorado. The Black Hills rush was the big excitement when he dis—when he left home.”
“I see,” Bromley nodded; and, forbearing to add any word either of curious questioning or of discouragement: “Have you finished your coffee?”
“The coffee, yes,” Philip assented hesitantly. “But there is a thing we’ve both been dodging, and we may as well have it out here and now. What did you think of me last night, Harry?”
Bromley smiled. “I thought you were completely human; a fact I have at times been somewhat inclined to doubt.”
Philip shook his head in reproachful deprecation.
“Do you make a joke out of everything?” he asked.
“Oh, no. But in this transitory scheme which we call Life, spelling it with a capital letter, I try to give things their relative value—that’s all.”
Again Philip shook his head.
“Can a man touch pitch and not be defiled? I wasn’t human, Harry; for the time being I was just a brute beast.”
“Oh, good heavens! Are you going to let that bit ofcommonplace asininity worry you for the rest of your life? Let it slide and forget it. You didn’t do that painted and powdered Jezebel any harm—you couldn’t.”
“Perhaps not: the harm I did was to myself.... It was the first time, Harry. I wish I could make you believe that it will also be the last.”
Bromley pushed his chair back and got up, laughing quietly.
“What your conscience needs, Philip, is a rain-coat. You’re out for a lot of trouble if you let such things soak in and make you soggy and uncomfortable, and you’d find the rain-coat a profitable acquisition. Let’s go get some cigars.”
Not knowing anything further to be done in the way of tracing the lost Dabney family beyond waiting hopefully for an answer to his note, Philip joined Bromley in making a round of the rental agencies; and, when a suitable double apartment was found, in selecting their joint stock of furnishings. This done, a period of inaction followed which was more trying than the hardest labor he had ever performed. Under the goading of unwonted idleness he grew moody and at times almost irritable; a frame of mind that acquired an added touch of moroseness when his note to Jean Dabney was returned to him from the post-office with “Uncalled for” rubber-stamped across the face of the envelope. Bromley had made a few social acquaintances and was constantly making more; but his efforts to drag Philip out of the rut into which he had fallen went for nothing.
“No, no—I wish you’d let up, Harry!” he wouldsay, when Bromley sought to include him in the invitations which were coming in increasing numbers to the breezy young Philadelphian. “I can’t talk silly nothings, I don’t dance, and I hardly know one card from another. Your new friends wouldn’t have any use for me.”
“Or you for them, you might add,” retorted the play-boy. “As a social animal you’re pretty nearly a total loss, Philip. Keep it up, and in time you’ll be able to give cards, spades and little casino to the sourest monk of the desert and beat him blind at his own game. Incidentally, you are headed right to join the procession of the unattached and unfettered in this hurrah city of the plain—the big bunch of fellows who are finding all the bad doors wide open, and who won’t take the trouble to knock at any of the decent ones.”
“You are preaching?—at me?” said Philip, with a sober smile.
“Call it what you please. I’ve been all the gaits and know what I’m talking about. You’ll get dry rot, and that’s worse than the other kind because it doesn’t show on the outside. You won’t think better of it and go to Mrs. Demming’s little dinner-and-after with me?”
“Not to-night; I’m pretty comfortable as I am. Chase along and have a good time in your own fashion. As you say, I’m more or less hopeless on the social side.”
With Bromley gone, he drew the deepest of the easy-chairs up to the table, lighted the gas reading-lamp and tried to lose himself in Howells’sThe Lady of the Aroostook, just out in book form; this until it should be time to go out for his dinner in one of the hotelsor restaurants. The book failed to hold him, and he threw it aside, struggled into the light overcoat demanded by the night breeze sweeping down from the Snowy Range, and took to the streets.
Since it was still early in the evening the night life of the city had scarcely begun. In Sixteenth Street the horse-cars made cheerful music on the crisp evening air with their jingling bells, and at each corner a group of homing workers waited under the gas street-light to board them. Philip drifted northward in the sidewalk throng, absently oblivious of his surroundings and curiously dissatisfied with himself and the new outlook upon life engendered by the possession of money. The free, hard-working, outdoor year, followed by the golden flood which had swept away the necessity for work of any kind, had broken orderly habit, and a sort of deadeningennuiwas the result. With all the healthy incentives to effort drowned in the flood, he could settle upon no object that seemed worth while. Upon the first day of his return to Denver he had sent his mother and sisters a sum which, as he knew, would postulate riches to the family of plain-living New England women; but with this dutiful channel filled—choked, for the time being, at least, by the generous stream he had poured into it—he had found no other reasonable use to which the golden surfeit could be put.
While he was still drifting and trying aimlessly to decide where he should go for his solitary dinner, he stepped aside to make room for a group of women workers coming out of a millinery shop. As he did so, two things occurred in swift sequence: he collided violentlywith a heavy-set man hurrying in the opposite direction, and in the rebound from the collision he found himself clasping a young woman in his arms to keep from knocking her down. Recovering his balance, he was beginning to apologize when the young woman gave a little cry of surprise and called him by name. Then he saw that chance had succeeded where directed effort had failed; that the young woman he had so hastily embraced was Jean Dabney.
It was reticent habit, no less than the lapse of a year, that tied his tongue and made his greeting awkwardly formal; and the inability to be instantly at ease made him rage inwardly. But the young woman helped him out.
“I have wondered, so many times, if we should ever meet again,” she was saying; and by this time he had clubbed his inherited pauciloquy into subjection sufficiently to say:
“I had almost given up the hope. I have been trying all sorts of ways to find out what had become of you.”
“You have? That was kind, and—and neighborly. And I don’t wonder that you couldn’t find us. It has been nearly a year, and everything changes so quickly out here.”
“It does,” he agreed; and then: “Where were you going when I came so near knocking you down?”
“Home—to give the family a surprise. I don’t usually get off before eight or nine at this season of the year.”
“Get off?” he queried.
“Get out of the shop, I mean. You didn’t know Icould be right industrious and useful, did you? I’m trimming hats here in Madame Marchande’s.”
Once more Philip struggled with inborn constraint and made himself say: “You said the family wouldn’t be expecting you this early. I haven’t been to dinner—I was just on my way. Won’t you go along and have a bite with me?”
She hesitated, but only for a moment.
“I don’t know why I shouldn’t, if you want me to.” Then, as he drew her arm under his own and steered her toward the Larimer Street corner; “You got the note I wrote you last spring?”
“Not until just the other day, when I came back from my year in the mountains. When I went away last spring I didn’t leave any forwarding address; I couldn’t, very well, because I hadn’t the remotest idea where I was going to be from week to week. So my mail was held here in the railroad office. Since I read your note, I’ve been trying to find out what had become of you and your mother and the girls, but I couldn’t get even a starting point. You have been in Denver all the time?”
“Yes; there was nothing to do but to stay here.” Then, as they turned west on Larimer: “Where are you taking me?”
“I thought we would go around to Charpiot’s—unless you would rather make it the Windsor or the St. James.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t do anything like that!” she protested quickly. “They are all three too horribly expensive.”
He smiled under cover of the darkness, saying: “Iguess we can stand the expense, for once in a way. We will go to Charpiot’s. Bero always has good cooks; imports them from New Orleans, so they say.” Then, in a gratulatory outburst as foreign to his later moods—and to the New England traditions—as was his praise of French cooks: “You can’t imagine what a comfort it is to be with you again. I was beginning to be afraid I had lost you for good and all.”
She acknowledged the outburst with a friendly little pressure of his arm.
“It is nice to know that you hadn’t forgotten us. How long did you say you have been back?”
“Only a few days; less than three weeks, to be exact.”
“And you are working in the railroad office again?” He did not answer because they were entering the hotel and M’sieu Bero, successor to the man who had made Charpiot’s the Delmonico’s of Denver, was bustling forward to welcome them.
“Delight’ to see you, M’sieu Trask;et vous, Ma’mselle—or is it the Madame?”
Philip flushed like an embarrassed boy and hastened to stand his companion’s identity upon its proper feet. “Miss Dabney,” he said. “She is from the South and knows your New Orleans cooking. Can you put us where we will be by ourselves?”
“But, yes! A private room up-stairs, maybe?”
“Oh, no; not that,” Philip broke in, flushing again at the too plain implication; “just a corner in the public room where we can have a table together.”
“I fix you,” was the reply; and the table for twowas secured, where Philip, sitting opposite his guest, had his first good look at her in a strong light.
She was thinner than she had been a year earlier, and the dark eyes had candlelight shadows under them; still, the eyes were very much alive, and the thinness had not marred the perfect oval of her face. There was a lack of color in the pretty lips; that and a translucency of skin hinting at confining work and long hours, and, quite likely, he imagined, at sterner privations. The thought of the privations stirred him deeply. She was too fine and precious to be thrown into the grinding mill of a struggle for existence. Without doubt that was what had happened. She was carrying the burden for the family of four, and was, by her own admission, working all sorts of hours doing it.
The dining-room was warm, and when she slipped out of her coat he went around to hang it up for her. With the coat in his hands he decided at once that it was too thin for a Denver evening wrap. Also, he noted that the collar and cuffs had been carefully turned and darned; and the same observation went for the tight-fitting basque with its bit of lace at the throat and the unmistakable signs of wear on the sleeves. Philip was not unfamiliar with the pinchings and makeshifts of economy; he had known them at home. But the signs of them here and now moved him strangely, as if life, which had lightly tossed Bromley and himself an incredible fortune, were bitterly unfair to the weak and more deserving.
Going back to his place, he picked up the menu card and asked her what she would like to eat.
“After a day’s work everything tastes good to me,” she answered, with the quick-flashing smile that carried him instantly back to a double seat in the Kansas Pacific day-coach and the spring-time afternoon when they had shared it together. “Won’t you order for both?”
He gave the dinner order, making it commensurate with the healthy appetite he had brought back from the mountains. After the waiter had left them, he said: “You asked me as we were coming in if I had gone back to work in the railroad office. I haven’t—as yet.”
“But you are meaning to?”
“Not exactly. You see, I have another job now. I am keeping personal books for a chap who owns a half-interest in a new mine on the other side of the main range.”
She was not so easily misled as Middleton had been.
“Oh!” she said, with a little gasp; “then youdidfind a mine?”
“Yes; after so long a time—after we had knocked about digging foolish holes in the hills nearly all summer.”
“‘We,’ you say. Did you really take the wild young man with you? I have thought about him so often.”
“You mean Bromley?—the fellow who tried to hold me up the night I went out to the tent colony to see you?”
“Yes. You told me about him, you remember.”
He nodded. “Yes; he was the other half of the ‘we.’ He was my partner: he still is.”
“And did he—was he——”
A lack of loyalty was not one of Philip’s failings.
“You may remember what you said of him that night a year ago. Your intuition hit the mark. Harry Bromley has a heart of gold. He is a much better man than I am.”
“A better man? In what way?”
“Well, for one thing, he has a much better sense of values—the life values, you know. And for another, he isn’t burdened with a New England conscience. But I am forgetting. You don’t know anything about New England and its conscience.”
“You shouldn’t throw my ignorance up at me,” she bantered. “Where is Mr. Bromley now?”
“He is here in Denver; we have rooms together in the Alamo Building. Just at this present moment he is dining out with some new society friends he has been acquiring—at a Mrs. Demming’s, I think he told me.”
“Oh,” she said; “the Demmings are rich people. I know, because I trimmed a hat for the daughter last week. But then, I suppose you and Mr. Bromley are both rich, too, now.”
Philip smiled. “Not offensively so, yet; though we both have money in the bank; rather more of it than we know what to do with. But most of the riches are still in the rough, as you might say. We have leased our mine, and it won’t begin to pan out the real thing until later in the summer.”
“You don’t know how glad I am!” she exclaimed, and her eyes were shining.
“Glad for Harry, or for me?”
“For both of you, of course. I think it is perfectly splendid—to go out into the wilderness that way andmake it give you something that makes you richer and doesn’t make anybody any poorer. I suppose you will go back to Yankeeland now and live happily ever after?”
“If I ran true to form, I imagine that is precisely what I should do,” Philip admitted soberly. “But I’m afraid I am not running true to form any more. This country out here has done something to me. I don’t know what it is, but I know that I don’t care to go back east to live. Are you homesick for Mississippi?”
Her eyelids drooped, and he found himself wondering why he hadn’t remembered how pretty and curved and long her eyelashes were.
“Sometimes I am,” she confessed, with a deeper note in her voice. “You see, it’s this way: when you leave a place that has been home for you as far back as you can remember.... But that is all over, now; there is nothing for us to go back to.”
Her use of the plural reminded him that he had not yet asked about the other members of the family. He hastened to atone for the neglect.
“Mummie isn’t at all well; she has never been very strong, you know. And Mysie and Mary Louise are in school. We are keeping house, after a fashion.” This was the brief reply his inquiry elicited; and then the dinner began to come on.
It was an excellent dinner, as Philip had predicted it would be, beginning with olives and celery and rich chicken gumbo, and ending with a brandy-sauced pudding for which Bero’s place was famous. Philip was again touched sympathetically when he saw how his table companion ate and when she broke into hisstory of the year afield to say, with a quaint twist of the pretty lips: “You must think I’m a perfect pig, eating the way I do; but I was awfully hungry. Some days when we are rushed in the shop I don’t take time to go out at noon. I didn’t to-day.”
He nodded understandingly, telling her to eat heartily and give the house a good name; this by way of covering his dismay at the conditions to which her admission pointed. It was even worse than he had prefigured. He was confident that it was only to save her pride that she had pleaded the lack of time for a midday meal. With three other mouths to fill, she simply couldn’t afford a luncheon for herself—he knew it. Not to be able to get enough to eat was horrible!
“How do you come to be trimming hats?” he asked, trying to push aside the discomforting thoughts stirred up by her tacit divulgence of the family poverty.
“It is my one little gift; and I didn’t know I had it. Oh, of course, I have always trimmed my own—and Mummie’s and the girls’; but that was nothing. I was so glad I could have cried when I found that somebody was willing to pay me money—real money—for doing it.”
“Yes; and I’ll bet they are not paying you half enough,” he frowned. “And keeping you on until eight or nine o’clock—that is a plain outrage!”
“You mustn’t find fault with my job,” she protested laughingly. “I can tell you I was glad enough to get it, in a city where almost all the places to work are filled by men.”
Though he maneuvered cleverly to prolong it to the uttermost, the excellent dinner came to an end all toosoon; and when she asked him what time it was, and he was obliged to tell her that it was a quarter past eight, she rose in a little panic of haste, saying that she must go home; that her mother would be worrying.
When he went around to help her into her coat he again felt the lightness of it and swore inwardly at the conventions that kept him from taking her out and buying her a better one. Why couldn’t he do just that? There was no reason save the silly inhibitions which kept a man from doing for a woman in need what he would be applauded for doing if the woman were a man. He thought of Bromley and his saying about the various ways of choking the cat. Would the play-boy be able to find some way of helping this dear, brave girl without hurting her pride? And if Bromley could do it, why couldn’t he—Philip—contrive to do it? It was a muddled world!
When he had paid for the dinners and had gone with her to the sidewalk, she gave him a small surprise by thanking him gratefully and trying to bid him good-by.
“But, see here!” he objected. “It isn’t ‘good-by’ yet. Of course I am going to see you safely home. Do you think I would turn you loose in the streets at this time of night?”
“Perhaps you wouldn’t want to do it in Yankeeland, but you can do it safely enough here,” she argued. “Haven’t you heard the Denver boast that, for all it is such a ‘wide-open’ city, a woman who minds her own affairs is safe in the streets at any time of the day or night? And it is true, too—or almost true.”
“That may all be. Just the same, I am going to takeyou home,” Philip insisted. “I owe it to my own self-respect, if I don’t owe it to you. Do we walk or ride?”
“It is only a little way; and, really, Mr. Trask, I wish you wouldn’t!”
“It is ‘Mr. Trask’ now, but it was ‘Philip’ last spring,” he reminded her.
“Well, then—Philip, won’t you let me run away by myself this time? We mustn’t stand here cluttering up Mr. Charpiot’s sidewalk. Please!”
“Is there any really good reason why I shouldn’t see you home?”
“N-no; I don’t reckon there is anyreason. Only——”
“Then that settles it. Come along,” and he made her take his arm.
In a very few minutes the truth of her saying that she had only a short distance to go was rudely thrust upon him. A silent walk of two squares down the nearest cross street toward the Platte ended at the stair of a brick building dingy and old as age might be reckoned in this Aladdin city of the plain; a building whose sidewalk-fronting windows yawned into the empty darkness of a former storeroom. And the street in which it stood was the street of the Corinthian plangencies. The neighborhood, as all Denver knew, was not merely a shabby one; it was disreputable.
“Good gracious!” he exclaimed, as they paused at the dark stairfoot. “You don’t mean to tell me you are living here!”
“You would come,” she answered reproachfully; then: “We have rooms on the second floor. I—I’m sorry I can’t ask you in.”
“But this neighborhood!” he expostulated, and the sternest of his Puritan ancestors could not have crowded more deprecation into the three words.
“I know,” she nodded. “But you remember the old saying—that beggars mustn’t be choosers. We were glad enough to find shelter anywhere. And the people ... they are not what they ought to be, perhaps; but they are kind to us. Won’t you let me thank you again and say good-night?”
Since there was nothing else to be done, he did it; though he waited until after she had disappeared up the unlighted stair before he turned to walk away, still shocked and dismayed at the thought of two unprotected women and two young girls living—being obliged to live—in such surroundings. It shouldn’t be permitted; it must not be permitted. Surely he and Bromley together could hatch up some plan by means of which Jean and her family could be helped; some plan which they could accept without becoming objects of charity.
It was at the Sixteenth Street corner that he came suddenly upon Middleton. The former tonnage cleric, clean shaven as to the beard, dapper and well fed, was standing in a dark doorway, fingering his mustaches and apparently waiting for some one.
“Hello, Philly!” he called. “Little off your beat down here,—what?”
With no definite reason for so doing, Philip began to bristle inwardly. Though he had worked with Middleton and roomed with him, he had never been quite able to conquer an ingrained aversion to the man.
“It is a public street, isn’t it?” he suggested.
“That is the trouble with it; it is too public for a truly good young man like yourself. Or perhaps you are not so truly good as you used to be. How about it?”
With the instinctive antagonism to prompt it, there was a sharp reply on the end of Philip’s tongue. But he suppressed it.
“I like to ramble around a little now and then in the evenings,” he substituted; and Middleton laughed.
“You don’t mean to say that you’ve become human enough to do a little ‘chasing’ for yourself?”
Philip did not affect to misunderstand. With the curious inner voice whispering that this was the proper time to answer a fool according to his folly, he said mildly: “Weren’t you continually setting me the example last year?”
The dapper one laughed again.
“You might go so far as to say that I am still setting it. I don’t mind telling you that right now I’m camping on the trail of one of the choicest little bits of womaninity you ever laid eyes on. If she shows up, I shall promptly shoo you away.”
Philip’s lip curled. “One of the Corinthians?” he queried.
“Not on your sweet life; nothing like it. She’s a black-eyed, black-haired little darling, all frost on the outside and fire on the inside—works in a millinery shop and comes home about this time every evening. She’s a little offish yet, but she’ll get over that pretty soon.”
While one might count ten, the flaring gas street-lightsturned darkly red for Middleton’s listener. But his voice was low and quite controlled when he said, “Of course you know her name?”
“Yep; she never would tell me, but I got it from one of the girls she works with. It’s a boy’s name—Jean.”
Nothing is more certain than that the inhibitions are dependent, more often than not, upon purely extraneous circumstances: environment, the mental attitude of the moment, even such trivial influences as the cut of one’s clothes and the obligations imposed thereby. Clad in a flannel shirt, baggy trousers and miner’s boots, Philip had thought nothing of the civilized restraints when he had flung himself, tooth and nail, upon the drunken bully who was menacing Bromley in the bar-room of the Leadville hotel. But now, with the mining-camp rawnesses put safely behind him, the conventional fetterings were not so easily broken. Middleton was a petty libertine, to be sure, but he knew that a few straightforward words of explanation about the Dabney family and his own connection with it would put an end to the ex-tonnage clerk’s pursuit of the daughter.
But the cool words were not spoken. In the moment of hesitation the curious inner voice prompted vengefully, “Will you stand for that? Haven’t you found out yet that you are in love with Jean Dabney—the girl to whom this fat rake is offering the bitterest insult a man of his breed can offer to a woman of hers?” and at this flame-hot goading the inhibitory bonds became as smoking flax and he lashed out with a swift, fury-driven uppercut to the smooth-shaven jaw.
At the smacking impact of the totally unexpectedblow the fat victim gasped, gurgled, tried to duck aside and stumbled and fell on the sidewalk. There were no passers-by to interfere, and for a single instant Philip stood looking down upon his handiwork in a fit of half-awed astonishment. Then the mad vengeance wave submerged him again and he sprang upon the fallen man, beating him futilely and trying to grind his face into the pavement. And at the last:
“Get up, you dirty hound!—get up and run if you want to go on living! If you ever so much as look at that girl again, I’ll cut your rotten heart out and feed it to the dogs in the street! Run! you damned——”