NOT for the honor of winning the Vanderbilt Cup, nor for the glory of
pitching a major league baseball team into the world's championship,
would Tony Ball have admitted to the familiar and derisive group in the
drugstore that he was--in the exact, physical aspect of the word--pure.
Secretly, and in an entirely natural and healthy manner, he was ashamed
of his innocence. He carefully concealed it in an elaborate assumption
of wide worldly knowledge and experience, in an attitude of cynical
comprehension, and indifference toward _girls_.
But he might have spared himself the effort, the fictions, of his
pose--had he proclaimed his ignorance aloud from the brilliantly lighted
entrance to the drugstore no one who knew him in the midweek, night
throng on Ellerton's main street would have credited Anthony with
anything beyond a thin and surprising joke. He was, at twenty, the
absolute, adventurous opposite of any conscious or cloistered virtue:
the careless carriage of his big, loose frame; his frank, smiling grey
eyes and ample mouth; his very, drawling voice--all marked him for a
loiterer in the pleasant and sunny places of life, indifferent to the
rigors of a mental or moral discipline.
The accumulated facts of his existence fully bore this out: the number
of schools from which, playing superlative baseball, he had been still
obliged to leave, carrying with him the cordial good will of master
and fellow, for an unconquerable, irresponsible laxity; the number and
variety of occupations that had claimed him in the past three years,
every one of which at their inception certain, he felt confident, to
carry him beyond all dreams and necessity of avarice; and every one, in
his rapidly diminishing interest, attention, or because of persistent,
adverse conditions over which, he asseverated, he had no control,
turning into a fallow field, a disastrous venture; and, conclusively,
the group of familiars, the easy companions of idle hours, to which he
had gravitated.
He met his mates by appointment at Doctor Allhop's drugstore, or by an
elaborate system of whistled formulas from the street, at which he would
rise with a muttered excuse from the dinner table and disappear.--He
was rarely if ever sought outright at his father's house; it was quite
another sort of boy who met and discoursed easily with sisters, who
unperturbed greeted mothers face to face.
It would have been useless, had he known it, to protest his virtue
inside the drugstore or out; a curious chain of coincidents had
preserved it. Again and again he had been at the point of surrendering
his involuntary Eden, and always the accident, the interruption, had
befallen, always he had retired in a state of more or less orderly
celibacy. On the occasion of one of those nocturnal, metropolitan
escapades by which matured boys, in a warm, red veil of whiskey, assert
their manhood and independence, he had been thrust in a drunken stupor
into the baggage car of the “owl” train to Ellerton. Instances might
be multiplied: life, in its haphazard manner, its uncharted tides
and eddies sweeping arbitrarily up and down the world, had carelessly
preserved in him that concrete ideal which myriads of heroic and
agonized beings had striven terribly and in vain to ward.
And so it happened, when Doctor Allhop turned with an elaborate
impropriety from the pills he was compounding in a porcelain pestle,
that Anthony's laugh was loudest, his gusto most marked, in the group
gathered at the back of the drugstore. A wooden screen divided them,
hid the shelves of bottles, the water sink, and the other properties and
ingredients of the druggist's profession, from the glittering and public
exhibition of the finished article, the marble slab and silver mouths of
the sodawater fountain, the uninitiated throng.
He was sitting on a case of prepared food, his legs thrust out before
him, and a thread of smoke coiling bluely from the cigarette held in
his broad, scarred hand. There was a little gay song on his lips, and a
roving, gay glint in his direct gaze. At frequent intervals he surveyed
with approbation maroon socks and a pair of new and shining pumps; the
rest of his apparel was negligent.
The sole chair was occupied by the plump bulk of Thomas Addington
Meredith, to whom a sharp nose in a moonlike countenance lent an
expression of constant inquiry and foxy caution. He was elaborately
apparelled in a suit which boasted a waistcoat draped with the gold
chain of an authentic timepiece; while, closing a silver cigarette case
scrolled large with his initials, a fat finger bore a ruby that, rumor
circulated, had been the gift of a married woman.
Lounging against a shelf Alfred Craik gazed absently at his blackened
and broken fingernails, his greasy palms. He was Anthony's partner
in the current industry of a machine shop and garage, maintained in a
dilapidated stable on the outskirts of Ellerton. It was a concern
mainly upheld by a daily levy on the Ball family for necessary tools and
accessories. He was, as always, silent, detached.
But William Williams amply atoned for any taciturnity on the part of the
others; he had returned a short while before from two checkered years
in the West; and, a broad felt hat cinched with a carved leather hand
pushed back from his brow, and waving the formidable stump of a cigar,
he expiated excitedly on the pleasures of that far, liberal land.
“Why,” he proclaimed, “I owe a saloon keeper in San Francisco sixty-five
dollars for one round of drinks--the joint was full and it was up to
me... nothing but champagne went, understand! He knows he'll get it.
Why, I collared ten dollars a day overseeing sheep. I cleaned up three
thousand in one little deal; it was in Butte City; it lasted nine days.
But 'Frisco's the place--all the girls there are good sports, all the
men spenders.”
“What did you come back East for?” Alfred Craik demanded; “why didn't
you stay right with it?”
“I got up against it,” William grinned; “the old man wouldn't give
me another stake.” The thought of the glories he had been forced
to relinquish started him afresh. “I cleaned up enough in a week at
billiards,” he boasted, “to keep me in Ellerton a year.”
“Didn't Bert Dingley take four bits from you last night at Hinkle's?”
Anthony lazily asked.
“That farmer!” the other scoffed; “I had a rank cue; they are all rank
at Hinkle's. I'll match him in a decent parlor for any amount.”
“How much will you put up?” Meredith demanded; “I will back Bert.”
“How much have you got?” William queried.
“How much have you?”
“If this was San Francisco I could get a hundred.”
“What have you got in real coin, Bill?” Tony joined in.
“Three nickles,” William Williams admitted moodily.
“I've got thirty-five cents,” Thomas added. “I wish I could get a piece
of change.”
“How's the car?” Anthony turned to hiss partner in the lull that
followed. The “car,” their sole professional charge, had been placed in
their hands by an optimistic and benevolent connection of the Balls.
“I had the differential apart again to-day,” Alfred responded, “but I
can't find that grinding anywhere. It will have to be all torn down,” he
announced with sombre enthusiasm.
“You have had that dam' thing apart three times in the last four weeks,
and every time you put it together it's worse,” Anthony protested; “the
cylinder casing leaks, and God knows what you did to the gears.”
“I wish I had a piece of change,” Thomas Meredith repeated, in a manner
patently mysterious.
“A temporary sacrifice of your tin shop--” Doctor Allhop suggested,
tinning from the skilful moulding of the pills on a glass slab.
“Not a chance! the family figurehead announced that he had taken my
watch 'out' for the last time.”
“He wants to plaster it on some Highschool skirt,” Alfred announced
unexpectedly.
“This robbing the nursery makes me ill,” William protested. “Out in
Denver there are real queens with gold hair--”
His period was lost in a yapping chorus from the west-wearied circle.
“Take it to bed with you,” he was entreated.
“Nothing in the Highschool can reach these,” Meredith assured them,
“this is the real thing--an all night seance. They have just moved in by
the slaughter house; a regular pipe--their father is dead, and the old
woman's deaf. Two sisters... one has got red hair, and the other can
kick higher'n you can hold your hand. The night I went I had to leave
early, but they told me to come hack... any night after nine, and bring
a friend.”
“I'll walk around with you,” William Williams remarked negligently.
“Not on three nickles. They told me to fetch around a couple of bottles
of port wine, and have a genuine party.”
Anthony Ball listened with rapidly growing attention, while he fingered
three one dollar bills wadded into the bottom of his pocket. He felt his
blood stir more rapidly, beating in his ears: vague pictures thronged
his brain of girls with flaming hair, dexterous, flashing limbs, white
frills, garters. With an elaborate air of unconcern he asked:
“Are they goodlookers?”
“Oh, Boy! they have got that hidden fascination.”
Anthony made a swift reckoning of the price of port; it would wipe out
the sum he was getting together for badly needed baseball shoes.--Red
hair!--He could count on no further assistance from his father that
month; the machine shop at present was an expense.
“Got any coin?” Meredith demanded.
“A few.”
The other consulted with importance the ostentatious watch. “Just the
minute,” he announced. “Come along; we can get the port at the Eagle;
we'll have a Paris of a time.”
Doctor Allhop offered an epigrammatic parallel between two celebrated
planets.
“I need new ball shoes,” Anthony temporized; “I ripped mine the last
game.”
Meredith rose impatiently. “Charge them to the family,” he ejaculated.
“But if you don't want to get in on this, there are plenty of others.
Two or three dollars are easy to raise in a good cause. Why, the last
night I spent in the city cost me seventeen bucks.”
“I guess I'll come.” Anthony instinctively barred his sudden eagerness
from his voice. He rose, and was surprised to find that his knees were
trembling. His face was hot too.--he wondered if it was red? if it would
betray his inexperience? “If they hand me any Sundayschool stuff,” he
proclaimed bigly, “I'll step right on it; I'm considerably wise to these
dames.”
“This is the real, ruffled goods.” Meredith settled a straw hat with a
blue band on his sleek head, and Anthony dragged a faded cap from his
pocket, which he drew far over his eyes. William Williams regarded them
enviously. Craik's thoughts had wandered far, his lips moved silently.
And Doctor Allhop had disappeared into the front of the drugstore.