He opened the door and slammed it shut behind him even before the boy could reply. Still smiling whimsically, Young Denny stood and listened to the grating of the wheels as the buggy was turned about outside—heard the old rig groan once, and then complain shrilly as it started on its way. But no one witnessed Old Jerry's wild descent to the village that night; no one knew the mad speed he made, save the old mare between the shafts; and she was kept too busy with the lash that whistled over her fat flanks to have given the matter any consistent thought.

Old Jerry drove that scant mile or two this night under the spur of his one greatest inspiration; and while he drove he talked aloud to himself.

"And I was a-goin' to fix it for him," he muttered once, "I was a-goin' to fix that old busted jug in the morning. Godfrey, I must 'a' been flustered!" He shrilled in uncontrollable glee at the recollection. And then again, later and far more gravely:

"I'm a-gittin' more religious every livin' day. I'm gittin' more religious jest from standin' around and kinda watchin' how things is made to work out right, jest when you've about decided that the Lord ain't payin' as much attention to details as he might."

He knew that there had to be a light in the windows of the Tavern office; he knew that he had to be in time. That was the finger of a Something behind the whole day's developments which was directing it all so masterfully. And because he was so certain of it all—because he was positive that he was the agent who had been selected to mete out justice at last—he found himself possessed of a greater courage than he had ever known before as he clambered down from his seat and mounted the worn steps.

A rush of chill air swept the group about the sprawling stove as he opened the door and made each member lift his head, each after a fashion that was startlingly indicative of the man himself. For Judge Maynard wheeled sharply as the cold blast struck him—wheeled with head flung back challengingly, and a harsh rebuke in every feature—while old Dave Shepard turned and merely shivered. He just shivered and flinched a little from the draft, appealingly. The rest registered an ascending scale of emotions betwixt and between.

Just as he knew he would find them they sat. Judge Maynard had the floor; and it was an easy thing to read that he had all but reached the crisis of his recital. Any man could have read that merely from the protest in the faces of the rest. And yet Old Jerry simply stood there and swept the group with serene and dangerous geniality.

"Evenin', folks," he saluted them mildly.

His mildness was like a match to the fuse. Judge Maynard pounded his fat knee with a fatter fist, and exploded thunderously:

"Shut that door!" he roared. "Shut that door!"

Old Jerry complied with amazing alacrity. The very panels shivered with the force of the swing that slammed it close. The Judge should have known right there—he should have read the writing on the wall—and yet he failed to do that thing. Instead, he turned back once more to his audience—back to his interrupted tale, and left Old Jerry standing there before the door, ignored.

"As I was sayin'." He cleared his throat. "As I was sayin' when this unnecessary interruption occurred, I realized right from the moment when I opened the door and saw him standing there in front of me, grinning, and his chin cut wide open, that there was something wrong. I am a discerning man—and I knew! And it didn't take me long to convince him—not very long!—that there were other communities which would find him more welcome than this one. Maybe I was harsh—maybe I was—but harsh cases require harsh remedies. And because he didn't have the money, I offered to let him have enough to carry him out of town, and something to keep him about as long as he'll last now, I'm thinking, although that place of his isn't worth as much as the paper to write the mortgage on.

"I knew it had come at last—but, at that, I didn't get anything that I wanted to call real proof until after we'd drawn up the papers and signed 'em, and were about ready to start back. Then, when we were coming down the steps of the clerk's office, I got all the proof I wanted, and a little more than that. He—he stumbled just about then, and would have gone down on his face if I hadn't held him up. And he was laughing out loud to himself, chuckling, with one fist full of money fit to draw a crowd. And he pulled away from me just when I was trying to force him into the buggy—pulled away and sort of leered up at me, waving that handful of bills right under my nose.

"'Oh, come now, Judge,' he sort of hiccoughed, 'this ain't the way for two old friends to part. This ain't the way for me to treat an old friend who's given me this. I want to buy you something—I want to buy you at least one drink—before I go. Come on, now, Judge. What'll you have?' says he."

They had all forgotten Old Jerry's interruption; they had forgotten everything else but the Judge's recital, that was climbing to its climax. That room was very quiet when the speaker paused and waited for his words to sink in—very quiet until a half-smothered giggle broke the stillness.

There was an unholy glee in that mirth—a mocking, lilting note of actual joy which rang almost profane at such a moment. Man for man it brought that circle erect in the chairs; man for man they sat and stared at the grotesque figure which was rocking now in a paroxysm of laughter too real for simulation. In a breathless hush they turned from the offender back to the judge, waiting, appalled, for the storm to break.

Judge Maynard's round moon-face went purple. Twice he tried to speak before he sat silent, annihilation in his eyes, until Jerry's outbreak had subsided. Then he lifted one forefinger and pointed, with all the majesty such a gesture could ever convey, to the empty chair—the chair which Old Jerry should have been occupying in becoming silence at that moment.

"Have you gone crazy?" he thundered. "Have you—or are you just naturally witless? Or was there something you wanted to say? If there isn't—if you've no questions to ask—you get over to that chair and sit down where you belong!"

It was then that the rest of the circle realized that something had gone wrong—most mightily wrong! According to all precedent, the little, white-haired man should have shrunk back and cowered beneath that verbal lash, and obeyed without a glance. They all realized that there was imminent a climax unforeseen by all—all but the Judge; and he was too blind with rage to see.

Very meekly Old Jerry bore his thundered rebuke—too meekly. But after the judge had finished he failed to move; he merely stood there, facing the town's great man. And in his attitude there was something of infantile, derisive, sparrowlike impudence as he peered back into the Judge's face—something that was very like the attitude of an outraged, ruffled old reprobate of a parrot rearing himself erect.

Old Jerry made no haste. It was a thing which required a nice deliberation. And so he waited—waited and prolonged the moment to its last, sweetest second. Once more he chuckled, to himself this time—just once, before he began to speak. That old Tavern office had never been so deathly still before.

"A question?" he echoed at last, thoughtfully. "A question? Well, Jedge, there was one thing I was a-goin' to ask you. Jest one triflin' thing I was kinda curious to know. Why, I was a-goin' to ask you, back a spell—What did you hev? It kinda interested me, wonderin' about it. But now—now that I've heard your story in full, I reckon I'll hev to change that question a mite. I reckon they ain't nothin' left but to ask you—How many did you hev? How many, Jedge? For, Jedge, you're talkin' most mighty wild tonight!"

And that silence endured—endured even after the huge man had half-risen, purple features gone white, and then dropped heavily back into his chair before that rigid figure in its sodden garments which had turned from him toward the rest of the circle of regulars.

Old Jerry made his formal exit that night—he knew that he was resigning his chair—but the thing was very cheap at the price.



"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.



CHAPTER 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 go unheeded 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 had groped 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 recollection of 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 out of 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. The 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 hate him! 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 go to 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 in one 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 sat and 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 repeated her 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 looked back 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.

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 and saw 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 that made 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 upon the 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 to whisper. "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.



CHAPTER 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, as 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—a man's gymnasium!"

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 way of 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 as unconcerned 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 opponent was 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 that liquids 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 contrast with 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.

"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 mouth neither 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?"

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!"

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's question 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 started toward 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.

"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."

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."

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 his solicitude 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."



CHAPTER XIII

When he had first looked up from the green-topped table and seen him standing there in the entrance of the gymnasium Ogden had only sensed the bigness of Denny Bolton's body—only vaguely felt the promise which his smooth black suit concealed. It was the face that had interested him most at that moment, and yet he had not even noticed the half healed cut that ran almost to the point of the chin. Young Denny's grave explanation of his quiet mirth caused him to look closer—made him really wonder now what had been its cause. There was a frankly inquisitive question half-formed behind his lips, but when he turned to find Denny sitting stripped to the waist, waiting for the garments which he held in his hands, he merely stood and stared. Bobby Ogden had seen many men stripped for the ring. It took more than an ordinary man to make him look even once—but he could not take his eyes off this boy before him. Once he whistled softly between his teeth in unconcealed amazement; once he walked entirely around him, exclaiming softly to himself. Then he remembered.

"Here, get into these," he ordered abruptly, and thrust the things into Denny's waiting hands.

While Denny was obeying he continued to circle and to admire critically.

"Man—man!" he murmured. "But you're sure put together right!" He was silent for a moment while he punched back and shoulders with a searching thumb. "Silk and steel," he went on to himself. "And not a lump—not a single knot! Oh, if you only knew how to use it; if you only knew the moves, wouldn't we give Flash the heart-break of his life! Now wouldn't we?"

Denny finished lacing his flat shoes and stood erect, and even Ogden's chattering tongue was silent. It was very easy now to see why that big body had seemed shoulder-heavy. From the shoulder points the lines ran unbroken, almost wedgelike, to his ankles. He was flat and slim in the waist as any stripling might have been. All hint of bulkiness was gone. He seemed almost slender, until one started to analyze each dimension singly, such as the breadth of his back, or the depth of his chest. Then one realized that it was only the slimness of fine-drawn ankles, the swelling smoothness of hidden sinews which created that impression. And Ogden's quick eye caught that instantly.

"I'd have said one-ninety," he stated judicially. "At least as much as that, or a shade better, before you undressed. Now I'd put it under—what do you weigh, anyhow?"

He slid the weight over the bar after Young Denny had stepped upon the white scales.

"One sixty-five—sixty-eight—seventy, and a trifle over," he finished. "Man, but you're built for speed! You ought to be lightning fast."

At that instant the boy called Legs opened the door and thrust in his head.

"The chief says if you're coming at all," he droned apathetically, "you might just as well come now."

Ogden threw a long bathrobe over his charge's shoulders as the latter started forward. He wanted to note the effect which the sudden display of that pair of shoulders and set of back muscles would have upon Flash Hogarty's temper. As they crossed the long room Denny's grave lack of concern was made to seem almost stolid in contrast with the heliotrope silk-shirted boy's excessive nervousness.

"Now remember what I told you," he whispered hoarsely. "Keep away from him—keep away and let him do the rushing—for he's got a punch that's sudden death! You can tire him out. He's old and his wind is gone."

The brass rods had been set up in their sockets in the floor and the space which they outlined in the middle of the room roped off and carpeted with a square of hard, brown canvas. The man called Boots Sutton was already in his corner, waiting, and his attitude toward the whole affair was very patently that of sheer boredom. He barely lifted his eyes as Young Denny crawled through the ropes at the opposite corner, behind the officiously fluttering Ogden. This was merely part of his every day's work; he spent hours each week either instructing frankly confessed amateurs or discouraging too-confident, would-be professionals. It was only because of the strangely venomous harshness with which Hogarty had given him his orders while he was himself dressing that he vouchsafed Denny even that one glance.

"I want you to get him," Hogarty snarled. "I want you to get him right from the jump—and get him!—and keep on getting him! Either make him squeal—make him quit—or beat him to death!"

But if Sutton failed to note the play of those muscles that bunched and quivered and ran like live things beneath the skin of the boy's back, when Bobby Ogden threw off the enveloping wrap with an ostentatious flourish and knelt to lace on his gloves, that disclosure was not entirely lost upon Hogarty. Watching from the corners of his eyes, Bobby saw him scowl and chew his lip as his head came forward a little. And immediately he turned to speak again in a whisper to Boots, squatting nonchalantly in his corner.

"There's no need, mind, of being careless," he cautioned. "He—he might have a punch, you know, at that. Some of 'em do—a lucky one once in a while. Just watch him a trifle—and hand it to him good!"

Sutton nodded and rose to his feet. Watch in hand, Hogarty vaulted the ropes, and Ogden, with a last whispered admonition, bundled up the bathrobe and scuttled from the ring.

At that moment Young Denny's bulkily slender body was even more deceptive. Sutton, even when trained to his finest, would have outweighed him twenty pounds. Now that margin was nearer thirty, and added to that, he was inches less in height. He was shorter of neck, blocky, built close to the ground. And the span of his ankle was nearly as great as that of Denny's knee.

Comparing them with detail-hungry eyes, Bobby Ogden saw, however, that from the waist up the boy's clean, swelling body totally shadowed the other's knotted bulk; he noted that, with arm outstretched, heel of glove against Sutton's chin, Denny's reach was more than great enough to hold the other away from him. Hard on the heels of that thought came the realization that that was a fine point of the game utterly outside of the boy's knowledge.

It was quiet—oddly, peacefully quiet for a second—in that long room. Then in obedience to a nod from Hogarty the lanky boy called Legs languidly touched a bell, and all that peaceful silence was shattered to bits. Ogden shouted aloud, without knowing it, a shrill, dismayed cry of warning, as Sutton catapulted from his corner; he shouted and shut his eyes and winced as if that rushing attack had been launched at himself. But he opened them again—opened them at the sound of a sickening smash of glove against flesh—to see Denny blink both eyes as his whole body rebounded from that blow.

Ogden waited, forgetting to breathe, for the boy to go down; he waited to see his knees weaken and his shoulders slump forward. But instead of shriveling before that pile-driver swing, he realized that Denny somehow was weathering the storm of blows that followed it; that somehow he had managed to keep his feet and was backing away, trying to follow faithfully his instructions.

Just as Ogden had pictured it would be, it all happened. Foot by foot Sutton drove him around the ring. There was no opening for Denny to return a blow—nothing but a maze of battering fists to be blocked and ducked and covered. Even the speed, the natural speed of lithe muscles for which Bobby had hoped, and hopelessly expected, was entirely lacking in every motion. Heavy-footed, ponderous, Young Denny gave way before that attack. Sutton, always reputed slow, was terribly, brutally swift of movement in comparison with the boy's faltering uncertainty.

Twice and a third time in the first minute of fighting Boots feinted aside his guard with what seemed childish ease and then drove his glove against the other's unprotected face. Time after time he repeated the blow, and at each sickening smack that answered the crash of leather against flesh Bobby Ogden gasped aloud and marveled. For at each jolt Denny merely blinked his eyes as he recoiled—blinked, and retreated a little more slowly than before.

At the bell Ogden was through the ropes and dragging him to his corner. A little trickle of blood was gathering on the point of Denny's chin where the glove had opened afresh the half-healed cut on his cheek; he was shaking his head as he waved aside the wet towel in Ogden's hands.

"Man, but you're some bear for punishment!" Ogden chattered, strangely weak himself beneath his belt. "If you only had a little speed—just a little! Why, he sent over a dozen to your chin that ought to have laid you away. But you're playing him right! You're working him, and if you can manage to hang on you'll get him in the end. Just keep away—keep away and let him wear himself out. But—oh, if you did have it. Just one real punch!"

Young Denny continued to shake his head—continued to shake it doggedly.

"Do—do you mean that that is as hard as he is likely to hit?" he queried slowly. "Do you mean—he was really trying—hard?"

Ogden stopped urging the wet towel upon him and stood and gazed at him with something close akin to awe in his eyes.

"Hard!" he echoed in a small voice. "Hard! How hard do you expect a man to hit?"

"Then your plan was wrong," Young Denny told him. "Of course," he hastened to soften that abrupt statement, "of course it would work all right, only—only I'm not much good at that kind of fancy work. I—I just have to wade right in, when I want to do any damage, because I'm slow getting away from a man. I can't punch—not hard—when I'm backing off. But now I aim to show you how hard I expect a man to hit, just as soon as they ring that bell!"

Hogarty was leaning over Sutton in the opposite corner, frowning and talking rapidly.

"What's the matter, Boots?" he demanded anxiously. "Haven't lost your kick, have you?"

Sutton gazed contemplatively down at his gloved hands and up again into his employer's face.

"Who'd you say that guy was?" he countered. "Where's he blowed in from—again?"

"A rube—down from the hills he called it. Just some come-on," Hogarty repeated his former information, "who thinks because he's cleaned up main street and licked the village blacksmith that he's a world-beater. Why, Boots? You aren't worried, are you?"

The contemplative gleam in Sutton's eyes deepened.

"Because," he stated thoughtfully, "just because there's some mistake—or—or he's made of brass. I—I hit him pretty hard, Flash—and do you know what he done? Well, he blinked. He—blinked—at—me. I never hit any man harder."

Hogarty's face had lost a little of its inscrutability. He flashed one sharp glance across at Young Denny in the other corner as he stepped back out of the ring and his frown deepened a little after that brief scrutiny. For the boy's body, squatting there, crouched waiting for the bell, was taut in every sinew, quivering with eagerness.

"You just failed to place 'em right, I guess," he reassured Boots. "Take a little more time, and get him flush on the bone. You can slow up a little. He isn't even fast enough to run away from you."

Again Hogarty nodded to the boy called Legs, and again the gong rang. Five minutes earlier it would have been hard for Bobby Ogden to have explained just what it was which he had half dreamed might lurk in those rippling muscles that bunched and ran beneath Denny's white skin. For want of a better name he had named it speed. And now, at the tap of the bell, he watched and recognized.

Swift as was Sutton's savage rush across the canvas, he had hardly left his corner in the ropes before Young Denny was upon him. The boy lifted and sprang and dropped cat-footed in the middle of the ring, hunched of shoulder and bent of knee to meet the shocking impact. It was bewilderingly rapid—terrifyingly effortless—this explosive, spontaneous answer of every muscle to the call of the brain. Just as before, Sutton feinted and saw his opening and swung. Young Denny knew only one best way to fight; he knew only that he had to take a blow in order to give one, and Sutton's fist shot home against his unprotected chin. He blinked with the shock, just as he had blinked before, and swayed back a little. Sutton had swung hard—he had swung from his heels—and he was still following that blow through when Denny snapped forward again.

It wasn't a long swing, but it was wickedly quick. From the waist it started, a short, vicious jolt that carried all the boy's weight behind it, and the instant that Denny whipped it over Sutton's chin seemed to come out to meet it—seemed almost to lift to receive it. And then, as his head leaped back, even before his body had lifted from the floor, the boy's other hand drove across and set him spinning in the air as he fell. He went down sideways, a long, crashing fall that dropped him limp in the corner which he had just left.

For a moment Denny crouched waiting for him to rise. Then he realized that Sutton would not rise again—not for a time. He saw Hogarty leap over the ropes and kneel—saw the boy Legs rush across with ammonia and water—and he understood. Ogden was at his side, pounding him upon the shoulder and shrieking in his ear. His eyes lifted from the face of the fallen man to that of the heliotrope silk-shirted person beside him.

"He's not really badly hurt, is he?" he inquired slowly. "I—I didn't hit him—too hard?"

Ogden ceased for a moment thumping him on the back.

"Hurt!" he yelped. "Didn't hit him too hard! Why, man, he's stiff, right now. He's ready for the coroner! Gad—and I was pitying you—I was——"

Young Denny shook him off and crossed and knelt beside the kneeling Hogarty. And at that moment Sutton opened his eyes again and stared dully into the ex-lightweight's face. After a time recognition began to dawn in that gaze—understanding—comprehension. Once it shifted to Denny, and then came back again. He made several futile efforts before he could make his lips frame the words.

Then, "Amateur," he muttered, and he managed to rip one glove from a limp hand and hurl it from him as he struggled to sit erect. "Amateur—hell! A-a-a-h, Flash, what're you tryin' to hand me?"



CHAPTER XIV

Denny had begun to get back into his clothes, pausing now and then to dabble tentatively at the freshly broken bruise with the wet towel which Ogden had at last forced him to accept, when the door of the dressing-room opened, and Hogarty stepped briskly inside and closed the door behind him.

The ex-lightweight ignored entirely the covertly delighted grin that lit up Bobby Ogden's features at his appearance. His own too-pale, too-thin lips were curved in a ghost of a smile; his face had lost all its dangerous tautness, but the greatest change of all lay there in his eyes. Their flaring antagonism had burnt itself out. And when Hogarty spoke it was once more in his smoothly perfect, delightfully measured, best professor-of-English style, for all that his opening remark was couched in the vernacular.

"Mr. Bolton," he began to the boy sitting quiet before him, "it looks as though we would have to hand it to you—which I earnestly desire you to believe I am now doing, with both hands. It may eventually prove that I lost a most valuable assistant through this morning's little flurry. I am not quite certain yet as to that as Boots is not sufficiently himself to give the matter judicious consideration.

"He still thinks I crossed him for the entertainment's sake—which is of little immediate importance. What I did come in for was to listen to anything at all that you may have to tell me. You'll admit, of course, that while your explanation as to your errand was strictly to the point, it was scarcely comprehensive. My own unfortunate temper was, no doubt, largely the cause of your brevity."

He hesitated a moment, clearing his throat and gazing blankly at the grinning Ogden.

"As Ogden here has of course told you, I'm—well, rather touchy when interrupted at my favorite pastime, and especially so when I am trying to get a few minutes relaxation with a pin-headed person who insists upon playing without watching the board.

"But you spoke of wanting an opportunity of—er—entering the game professionally. I'm not admitting you're a world-beater, understand—or anything like that! You've just succeeded in putting away a man who was as formidable as the best of them, five years ago. And five years isn't today, by any means. I've been looking for a real possibility to appear for so long that I've grown exceedingly sensitive at each fresh failure. And yet—and yet, if you did have the stuff——!"

Again he stopped and Denny, watching, saw the proprietor's face glow suddenly with a savage sort of exultation. His eyes, half-veiled behind drooping lids that twitched a little, went unseeingly over the boy's head as though they were visualizing a triumph so long anticipated that it had become almost a lost hope. Again that promise of something ominous blackened the pupils—something totally dangerous that harmonized perfectly with the snarl upon his lips.

Hogarty's whole attitude was that of a man who wanted to believe and yet who, because he knew that the very measure of his eagerness made him doubly easy to convince, had resolved not to let himself accept one spurious proof. And all his skepticism was shot through and through with hate—a deadly, patient sort of hatred for someone which was as easy to see as it was hard for the big-shouldered boy to understand.

There was craft in the ex-lightweight's bearing—a gentleness almost stealthy when he leaned forward a little, as if he feared that the first abrupt move or word on his part would frighten away that timid hope.

"I believe that you said some one sent you. You—you did not mention the name?"

Denny leaned over and picked up his coat from a chair beside the bench, searching the pockets until he found the card which the plump, brown-clad newspaper man had given him. Without a word he reached out and put it in Hogarty's hands.

It bore Jesse Hogarty's Fourteenth Street address across its face. Hogarty turned it over.

"Introducing the Pilgrim," ran the caption in the cramped handwriting of Chub Morehouse's stubby fingers. And, beneath, that succinct sentence which was not so cryptic after all:

"Some of them may have science, and some of them may have speed, but after all it's the man who can take punishment who gets the final decision. Call me up, if this ever comes to hand."

Very deliberately Hogarty deciphered the words, lifted a vaguely puzzled face to Young Denny, who waited immobile—and then returned again to the card. He even nodded once in thorough appreciation of the title which Morehouse had given the boy; he smiled faintly as he remembered Denny as he had stood there in the entrance of the big room, a short while before, and realized how apt the phrase was. Then he began to whistle, a shrill, faint, monotonous measure, the calculating glitter in his eyes growing more and more brilliant.

"So!" he murmured thoughtfully. "So-o-o!"

And then, to Denny:

"Was there—did he make any comment in particular, when he gave you this?"

The boy's eyes twinkled.

"He—made several," he answered. "He said that there was a man at that address—meaning you—that would fall on my neck and weep, if I happened to have the stuff. And he warned me, too, not to think that Jed The Red fought like a school boy, just because he was a second-rater—because he didn't, nothing like that!"

Hogarty laughed aloud. That sudden, staccato chuckle was almost startling coming from his pale lips. It hushed just as quickly as it had begun.

"Jed The Red, eh?" he reiterated softly, and he began tapping the card with his fingertips. "I see, or at least I am commencing to get a glimmer of those possibilities which Mr. Morehouse may have had in mind. And now I think the one best thing to do would be to call him up, as he has here requested. As soon as you finish dressing Ogden here will show you the rest of the works, if you'd care to look around a little. It is entirely likely that we shall want to talk with you directly."

He wheeled abruptly toward Ogden who had been listening without a word, the broad grin never leaving his lips. It was the silk-shirted boy to whom Hogarty addressed the rest of that sentence.

"And you," he said, and his voice shed with astounding completeness all its syllabled nicety. "You try to make yourself useful as well as pestilential. Get him a bit of adhesive for that cut. It looks as bad as though a horse had kicked him there.

"And the rest of your mob will be swarming in here in a few minutes, too. You can tell them that Sutton is—er—indisposed this morning, and that they'll have to play by themselves."

He nodded briefly to Denny and opened the door. But he stopped again before he passed out.

"There's one other question, Mr. Bolton," he said over his shoulder. "And please believe that I am not usually so inquisitive. But I'm more than a little curious to know why you did not present this card first—and go through the little informal examination I arranged for you afterward? It would have insured you a far different reception. Was there any special reason, or did you just overlook it?"

Denny dabbed again at the red drop on his chin.

"No, I didn't exactly forget it," he stated ponderously. "But, you see, I kind of thought if I just told you first that I wanted to see if I had any chance, you wouldn't make any allowances for me because I——"

Hogarty's second nod which cut him short was the quintessence of crisp satisfaction.

"I understand," he cut in. "Perfectly! And quite right—quite right!"

The ex-lightweight proprietor was sitting with his chin clasped in both palms, still staring at the half facetious words of introduction which the plump newspaper man had penciled across that card, when the door of the small office in the front of the gymnasium was pushed open a crack, some scant fifteen minutes after his peremptory summons had gone out over the wire, and made him lift his head.

His eyes were filmed with a preoccupation too profound to be dispelled by the mock anxiety upon the chubby round countenance which Morehouse thrust through that small aperture between door and frame, or his excessively overdone caution as he swung the door wider and tiptoed over the threshold, to stand and point a rigidly stubby finger behind him at the trail of nail prints which Young Denny's shoes had left across the glistening wax an hour or so earlier.

"Jesse," he whispered hoarsely, "some one has perpetrated here upon the sacred sheen of your floor a dastardly outrage! I merely want you to note, before you start running the guilty one to earth, that I am making my entrance entirely in accordance with your oft-reiterated instructions. I am not he!"

For all the change which it brought about in Hogarty's face that greeting might have been left unspoken. He vouchsafed the fat man's elaborate pantomime not so much as the shadow of a smile, nodded once, thoughtfully, and let his eyes fall again to the card between his elbows on the table-top.

"Come in, Chub," he invited shortly. "Come in." And as a clamor of many voices in the outer entrance heralded the arrival of the rest of Ogden's crowd: "Here comes the mob now. Come in and close the door."

Morehouse, still from head to toe a symphony in many-toned browns, shed every shred of his facetiousness at Hogarty's crisply repeated invitation. He closed the door and snapped the catch that made it fast before he crossed, without a word, and drew a chair up to the opposite side of the desk.

"Your hurry call just caught me as I was leaving for lunch," he explained then. "And I made pretty fair time getting down here, too. What's the dark secret?"

The black-clad proprietor lifted his lean jaw from his hands and gazed long and steadily into the newspaper man's eyes, picked up the bit of pasteboard which bore the latter's own name across its front and flipped it silently across the table to him. Morehouse took it up gingerly and read it—reversed it and read again.

"Nice little touch, that," he averred finally. "Rather neat and tasty, if I do say it myself. 'Introducing The Pilgrim!' Hum-m-m. You can't quite appreciate it of course, but—oh, Flash, I wish you could have seen that big boy standing there in the door of that little backwoods tavern, just as I saw him, about a week ago! Why, he—he was——"

"He's come!" Hogarty cut in briefly.

Morehouse's chin dropped. He sat with mouth agape.

"Huh?" he grunted. "He's—he's come where?"

Where his facetiousness had failed him Morehouse's round-eyed astonishment, a little tinged with panic, was more than successful. Hogarty permitted himself to smile a trifle—his queer, strained smile.

"He is here," he repeated gravely, and the words were couched in his choicest accents. "He came in, perhaps, an hour ago. That is his monogramed trail across the floor which caught your eye. Oh, he's here—don't doubt that! I'll give you a little review of the manner of his coming, after you tell me how you ever happened to send him—why you gave him that card? What's the answer to it, Chub?"

That same light of savage hope and cruelly calculating enmity, all so strangely mixed with a persistent doubt, which Young Denny had seen flare up in the ex-lightweight's eyes a little while before, back in the dressing-room, began to creep once more across Hogarty's face.

"You know how long I've been waiting for one to come along, Chub," he went on, almost hoarsely. "You know how I've looked for the man who could do what none of the others have done yet, even though he is only a second-rater. Twice I thought I had a newcomer who could put The Red away—and put him away for keeps—and I just fooled myself because I was so anxious to believe. I've grown a trifle wary, Chub, just a trifle! Now, I'd like to hear you talk!"

Morehouse sat and fingered that card for a long time in absolute silence—a silence that was heavy with embarrassment on his part. He understood, without need of explanation, for whom that chill hatred glowed in the spare ex-lightweight's eyes—knew the full reason for it. And because he knew Hogarty, too, as few men had ever come to know him, he had often assured himself that he was thankful not to be the man who had earned it.

That knowledge had been very vividly present when, a few days before, on the platform of the Boltonwood station, he had requested Denny Bolton to give him back his card for a moment, after listening to the boy's grave explanation of the raw wound across his cheek, and on a quite momentary impulse written across its back that short sentence which was so meaty with meaning. Every detail of Hogarty's country-wide search for a man who could whip Jed The Red was an open secret, so far as he was concerned; he was familiar with all the bitterness of every fresh disappointment, but he had never seen Hogarty's face so alive with exultant hope as it was at that moment.

And Morehouse was embarrassed and sorry, and ashamed, too, of what seemed now must have been a weak surrender to an impulse which, after all, could have been born of nothing but a too keen sense of humor. Hogarty's face was more than eager. It was white and strained.

"Flash," he began at last, ludicrously uncomfortable, "Flash, I'm sorry I wrote this, for I always told you that if I ever did send any one to you he'd be a live one and worth your trouble. Right this minute I can't tell why I did it, either, unless I am one of those naturally dangerous idiots with a perverted sense of what is really funny. Or maybe I didn't believe he'd ever get any farther from home than he was that morning when I gave him this card. That must have been it, I suppose. Because I never saw him in action. Why, I never so much as saw him kick a dog!

"I'm telling you because I don't want you to be disappointed again—and yet I have to tell you, too, that right at the time I wrote this stuff, Flash, just for a minute or two, I believe I did almost think he might be an answer to your riddle. Maybe that was because he had already licked Jed The Red once, and I should judge, made a very thorough job of it at that. That must have influenced me some. But let me tell you all the story and maybe you'll understand a little better—something that I can't say for myself right at this very instant."

Morehouse began at the very beginning, looking oftener at the card between his fingers than at Hogarty's too brilliant eyes, which were fairly burning his face.

"In the first place, Flash," he went on, "you know as well as I do that The Red isn't a real champion and never will be. He has the build and the punch, and he's game, too—you'll have to hand him that. But stacked up against the men who held the title ten years ago he'd last about five rounds—if he was lucky. I don't know why that is, either, unless he is so crooked at heart that he loses confidence even in himself when he has to face a real man. But the public at this minute thinks he is as great as the greatest. The way he polished off The Texan had convinced them of that—and we—well, the paper always tries to give them what they want, you know.

"Now that was the reason I ran up north last week, after I'd got a tip that Conway hailed originally from a little New England village back in the hills—one of those towns that are almost as up-to-date today as they were fifty years ago. It looked like a nice catchy little story, which I will, of course, admit I could have faked just as well as not. But it was the cartoons I wanted. You can't really fake them—not after you've once known the real thing. And as it happens I have known it, for I came from a village up that way myself.

"And, then, I was curious, too. I've always had a private opinion that if chance hadn't pitchforked Conway into the prize-ring he'd have made a grand success as a blackjack artist or a second-story man. But I wanted the pictures, and it wasn't a very difficult matter either to get them. You see I knew just where I'd find what I wanted, and things panned out pretty much as I thought they would.

"It didn't take more than a half hour to spread the report that Conway was practically the only really famous man in the country today, and in a fair way to make his own home town just as celebrated. It may sound funny to you, for you don't know the back-country as I do, but just that short article in the daily, coupled with a few helpful hints from me that I was looking for all the nice, touching incidents of his boyhood days, with the opinions of the oldest inhabitants, and maybe a few of their pictures to be used in a big Sunday feature, brought them all out: the old circle of regulars which always sits around the tavern stove nights, straightening out the country's politics and attending strictly to everybody's affairs but their own.

"Eager? Man, it was a stampede! I reckon that every male inhabitant within a radius of five miles was there when I opened the meeting with a few choice words—every man but one, and he comes in just a little later in this tale. They surely did turn out. It was as perfect a mass meeting as any I've ever seen, but the crowd itself didn't get much of a chance to talk—not individually anyhow. They were simply the chorus of 'ayes' which the town's big man paused now and then for them to voice.

"He did the talking, Flash. They called him 'Judge'—they most always do in those towns. He most certainly monopolized the conversation, and while he gave his monologue, I sat and got the best of them down on paper. They thought I was taking notes. I'll show you his picture some day. He's the meanest man I ever met yet—and I've met a few! Puffy-faced and red, and too close between the eyes. Fat, too! Somehow I'm ashamed of being plump myself, since meeting him.

"He did all the talking, and from the very first time he opened his mouth I knew he was lying. You can always tell a professional liar; he lies too smoothly, somehow. Well, to judge from his story Conway was the only unspotted cherub child that had ever been born and bred in that section. Oh, yes, he'd seen the promise in Conway; he knew that Conway was to be the pride and joy of the community, right from the first. He'd always said so! Why, he was the very man who had given him his first pointers in the game, when he was cleaning up all the rest of the boys in town, just by way of recreation. If I'd never had a suspicion before I'd have known just from those slick sentences of his that Conway had never been anything in that village but a small-sized edition of the full-blown crook he is today.

"But I didn't have any reason to contradict him, did I? He was doing all that I could ask, and more. For there wasn't a man in that whole crowd who dared to sneeze until he got his cue from the Judge. But that fat man got his jolt finally, just the same, and got it good, too.

"He had just finished telling how Conway had cleaned up the village kids, irrespective of size, whenever he felt the need of exercise, and was looking around at the circle behind him to give them a chance to back him up, when it happened. I told you a minute ago that I wished you could have seen that boy, as I saw him that night, standing there in that tavern doorway. You see, he'd come in so quietly that nobody had heard him—come in just in time to hear the Judge's last words. And when the Judge turned around he looked full into that boy's eyes.

"Oh, he got his, good and plenty! I didn't watch him very closely because it was hard for me to take my eyes off the white face of that boy at the door. But I did see that he went pretty nearly purple for a minute, and I heard him gurgle, too, he was that surprised, before he caught his breath. Then he stuck out one hand and tried to bluff it out.

"'There's one of 'em, right now,' he sang out; but he should have known that a man who's sure of his ground doesn't have to shout to make his point. 'There's Young Denny Bolton,' he said, 'who went to school with him, right here in this town. Ask him if Jeddy Conway was pretty handy as a boy!' And he laughed, Flash—commenced to chuckle! Oh, there was no misunderstanding what he meant to insinuate. 'Ask him—but maybe he's still a little mite too sensitive to talk about it yet—eh, Denny?'

"He thought he could bluff it—bluff me, with that boy standing there in the doorway calling him a liar as if I didn't know it all, yet at that minute I couldn't help but ask that boy a question. I think it was mostly because I wanted to hear what the voice of a man with a face like his would sound like, for he hadn't opened his lips to answer that fat hypocrite's insinuation.

"So I asked him if he had known Conway well—asked him if he had had a few set-to's with him himself. I'm not going to forget how he looked when he turned toward me, either. I'm not going to forget the look on his face as he swung around. And I'm remembering his voice pretty fairly well, too, right now!

"'Maybe,' he answered me, and he almost drawled the words. 'Maybe I did,' he said.

"Why, Flash, he couldn't have said more if he had talked for a week. He'd said all there was to say, now, hadn't he? But it let the Judge out, just the same, for he just gave the circle behind him the the high sign and set the crowd to laughing for a minute or two, until the tension was relieved. I didn't laugh myself. There didn't seem to be much of a joke about it after seeing that boy's eyes. It was Bolton—Young Denny, they called him—and I got his story, their side of it at least, after he shut the door behind him.

"It's another thing I'd be more likely to understand than you would, Flash, because you've never lived in a village like that, and I have. Back a hundred years or so the first settlement had been named for his family—Boltonwood, they'd called it—but I guess the strain must have petered out. From all I could gather the Boltons had been drinking themselves to death with unfailing regularity and dispatch for several generations back, and I heard a choice detailed description, too, of the way the boy's own father had made his final exit—heard it from that moon-faced leading citizen who did all the talking—that made me want to kick him in the face. I don't know yet why I didn't. I was sitting on the tavern desk with my feet on a level with his face. I should have bashed him a good one. It's one of the lost opportunities which I'll always regret, unless maybe I take a Saturday off some day and run up and beat him up proper!

"He gave me a nice little account of how the boy's dad had gone over, screaming mad, with the town's elite standing around saying, 'I told you so,' and that big scared kid kneeling beside his bed, trying to pray—trying to make it easier for him.

"Did you ever see a flock of buzzards circling, Flash, waiting for some wounded thing beneath them to die? No? Well, I have, and it isn't a pretty sight either. That was what they made me think of that night. And I learned, too, how they'd been waiting ever since for that boy to go the way his father had traveled before him; they even told me that the same old jug still stood in the kitchen corner, and would have pointed out his tumble-down old place on the hill, where they had let him go on living alone, only it was too dark for any one to see.

"Odd, now wasn't it? But it didn't come to me at that moment. I never gave it a thought that there was a man who had licked Conway once and might do it again. But I didn't forget him; I wanted to, that night, but I couldn't. And I guess I was still thinking about him when some one touched my arm the next morning, while I was waiting for the train, and I turned around and found him standing there beside me.

"Flash, have you noticed how grave he is—kind of sober-quiet? Have you? That comes from living too much alone. And he's only a kid, after all—that's all, just a kid. He startled me for a moment, but the minute I looked at him that morning I knew he had something on his mind, and after I'd tried to make it a little easier for him I gave him a chance to talk.

"He had a big raw welt across one cheek—a wicked thing to look at! You've noticed it, I see. Well, he stood there fingering it a little, trying to think of a way to begin gracefully. Then he got out the paper with the account of Jed The Red's last go in it and jumped right into the middle of all that was bothering him. He hunted out the statement of Conway's share of the purse and asked me if it was true. I told him it was—that I'd written it myself. And then he asked me, point blank, how he could get a chance at Conway. He—he said Conway had never been able to whip him, Flash—said he didn't believe he ever could!

"Now, I'm sentimental—I know that. But I manage to keep my feet on the ground now and then just the same. And so I want to say right here that it wasn't his words that counted with me. Why, I'd have laughed in his face only for the way he said them! As it was, I said too much. But I thought of you then—I couldn't help it, could I? It hit me smash between the eyes! His face had been reminding me of something—something I couldn't place until that minute. Flash, do you know what he made me think of? Do you? Well, he looked like a halftone print of the Pilgrim Fathers—the kind that they hang on the walls in the district schools. And it got me—got me!—maybe you know why. I don't. But I wrote it on this card, under your address, and gave it to him.

"I would have laughed at him only he was so mighty grave and quiet. One doesn't make a practice of laughing at men who are as big as he is—not when they carry themselves like that. I kept my funny feelings to myself, if I had any, while I spent a minute or two sizing him up. And that brought me back to his chin—back to that big, oozing cut. I had been waiting for an opportunity to ask him about it, and didn't know myself how to go about it. Just from that you can realize how he had me guessing, for it takes quite some jolt to make me coy. So I followed his own lead finally and blurted the question right out, without any fancy conversational trimmings, and he told me how it had happened.

"One of his horses had kicked him. You look as though you could have guessed it yourself! He didn't tell you, did he, Flash? No-o-o? Well, that was it. He said he had gone blundering in on them the night before, to feed, without speaking to them in the darkness. It isn't hard to guess what had made him absent-minded that night. You can't know, just from seeing it now, how bad that fresh cut was, either. It looked bad enough to lay any man out, and I told him so. But he said he had managed to feed his horses just the same—he'd worked them pretty hard that week in the timber!

"It wasn't merely what he said, you see; it was the way he said it. I've made more fuss before now over pounding my finger with a tack hammer. And I did a lot of talking myself in that next minute or two. A man can say a whole lot that is almost worth while when he talks strictly to himself. It wasn't alone the fact that he had been able to get back on his feet and keep on traveling after a blow that would have caved in most men's skulls that hit me so hard. The recollection of what his eyes had been like that night before, when he had handed the Judge the lie without even opening his lips, helped too—and the way he shut his mouth, there on the station platform, when I gave him an opening to say his little say concerning the village in general. He just smiled, Flash, a slow sort of a smile, and never said a word.

"Man, he knew how to take punishment! Oh, don't doubt that! I realized right then that he had been taking it for years, ever since they had counted his father out, with the whole house yelling for the stuff to get him, too. He'd been hanging on, hoping for a fluke to save him. He'd been hanging on, and he didn't squeal, either, while he was doing it. Not—one—yip—out—of—him!

"So I made him give me back the card and I wrote the rest of this stuff across the back of it. And again I'll tell you, Flash, right now, I'm not sure why I did it. But I'll tell you, too, just as I told myself a few mornings ago, back there on that village station platform, that if I were Jed The Red and I had my choice, I wouldn't choose to go up against a man who had been waiting five years for an opening to swing. No—I would not! For he's quite likely to do more or less damage. I never thought he'd turn up, and I don't know whether I am sorry or not. But now that he's here, what are you going to do about it?

"It's my fault, but whatever you do I want to ask you not to do one thing. I want you to promise not to try to make a fool of the boy, Flash? You're, well—a little bit merciless on some of 'em, you know. It's not his fault, and I—why, damn it, I haven't met a man in years I like as I do that big, quiet, lonesome kid! Now, there's your story. It explains the whole thing, and my apologies go with it. What are you going to do?"



CHAPTER XV

Jesse Hogarty had been listening without moving a muscle—without once taking his two brilliant eyes from Morehouse's warm face—even when Morehouse refused to look back at him as he talked.