Part 13 (2/2)

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 G.o.d--please G.o.d, 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 s.h.i.+mmering ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 s.h.i.+rt 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.

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