Part 18 (1/2)
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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, 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, d.a.m.n 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.
”'Introducing The Pilgrim,'” he murmured to himself, after a moment of silence, and the professor of English accent could not have been more perfect, ”The Pilgrim! Hum-m-m, surely! And a really excellent name for publicity purposes, too. It--it fits the man.”
Then he threw back his head--he came suddenly to his feet, to pace twice the length of the room and back, before he remembered. When he reseated himself he was gnawing his lip as if vexed that he had showed even that much lack of self-control. And once more he buried the point of his chin in his hands.
”Do, Chub?” he picked up the other's question silkily. ”What am I going to do? Well, I believe I am going to pay my debts at last. I think I am going to settle a little score that has stood so long against me that it had nearly cost me my self-respect.”
That lightning-like change swept his face again, twisting his lips nastily, stamping all his features with something totally bad. The man who had never been whipped by any man, from the day he won his first brawl in the gutter, showed through the veneer that was no thicker than the funereal black and white garb he wore, no deeper than his superficially polished utterance which he had acquired from long contact with those who had been born to it.
”I'm going to pay my debts,” he slurred the words dangerously, ”pay them with the same coin that Dennison slipped to me two years ago!”
Little by little Morehouse's head came forward at the mention of that name. It was of Dennison that the plump newspaper man had been subconsciously thinking ever since he had entered Hogarty's immaculate little office; it was of Dennison that he always thought whenever he saw that bad light kindling in the ex-lightweight's eyes. Dennison was the promoter who had backed Jed The Red from the day when the latter had fought his first fight.
And, ”You don't mean,” he faltered, ”Flash, you don't mean that you think that boy can stop----”
Hogarty's thin voice bit in and cut him short.
”Think?” he demanded. ”Think? I don't have to think any more! I know!”
For a second he seemed to be pondering something; then he threw up his head again. And his startlingly sudden burst of laughter made Morehouse wince a little.
”Don't make a fool of him, Chub?” he croaked. ”Be merciful with the boy! Man, you're half an hour late! I did my best. Oh, I'm bad--I know just how bad I can be, when I try. But he called me! Yes, that's what he did--he as much as told me that I wasn't giving him a chance to get his cards on the table. So I ran him up against Sutton. And I did more than that. I told Boots to get him--told him to beat him to death--and I meant it, too! And do you know what happened? Could you guess? Well, I'll tell you and save you time.
”He went in and took enough punishment from Boots in that first round to make any man stop and think. He put up the worst exhibition I ever saw, just because he was trying to fight the way Ogden had coached him, instead of his own style. That was the first round; but it didn't take him very long to see where he had been wrong. There wasn't any second round--that is, not so that you could really notice it.
”He was waiting for the bell, and the gong just seemed to pick him up and drop him in the middle of the ring. And Sutton went to him--and he caught Boots coming in! Why, he just snapped his right over and straightened him up, and then stepped in and whipped across his left, and Boots went back into the ropes. He went back--and he stayed back!”
Swiftly, almost gutturally, Hogarty sketched it all out: Young Denny's calm statement of his errand, his own groundless burst of spleen, and the outcome of the try-out which had sent him hurrying back to Denny's dressing-room with many questions on his tongue's tip and a living hope in his brain which he hardly dared to nurse.