Part 14 (1/2)
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 fas.h.i.+on 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 astonis.h.i.+ngly 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 Standis.h.!.+” that silk-s.h.i.+rted 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 embarra.s.sment 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-s.h.i.+rted 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 embarra.s.sing mistake, sir. I am Mr. Jesse Hogarty. You, however, if I may be permitted that a.s.sertion, 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!”