Archaeologists of a future age will doubtless, in their minute
explorations of this region, come upon the petrified remains of golf
balls in such number as will occasion learned dispute. Found so
profusely and yet so far from any known course, they will perhaps give
rise to wholly erroneous surmises. Prefacing his paper with a reference
to lost secrets once possessed by other ancients, citing without doubt
that the old Egyptians knew how to temper the soft metal of copper, a
certain scientist will profoundly deduce from this deposit of balls, far
from the vestiges of the nearest course, that people of this remote day
possessed the secret of driving a golf ball three and a half miles, and
he will perhaps moralize upon the degeneracy of his own times, when the
longest drive will doubtless not exceed a scant mile.
For three days Sharon sprayed out over the landscape, into ideal
golf-ball covert, where many forever eluded even the keen eyes of Wilbur
Cowan, one hundred balls originally purchased by the selecter golfing
set of Newbern. Hereupon he refused longer to regard the wooden driver
as a possible instrument of precision, and forever renounced it. Elihu
Titus heard him renounce it balefully in the harness room one late
afternoon, and later entering that apartment found the fragments of a
shattered driver.
It remained for Wilbur Cowan to bring Sharon into the game by another
avenue. A new campaign was entered upon, doubtfully at first by Sharon,
at length with dawning confidence. He was never to touch a wooden club.
He was to drive with an iron, not far, but truly; to stay always in the
centre of the fairway and especially to cultivate the shorter approach
shots and the use of the putter. The boy laboured patiently with his
pupil, striving to persuade him that golf was more than a trial of
strength. From secret lessons back of the stable they came at length to
furtive lessons over the course at hours when it was least played. John
Knox McTavish figured at these times as consulting expert.
"It's th' shor-r-t game that tells th' stor-r-r-y," said John; and
Sharon, making his whole game a short game, was presently telling the
story understandably, to the vast pride of the middle man who provided
endless balls for his lessons.
It was a day of thrills for them both when Rapp, Senior, publicly
challenged and accepting with dreams of an easy conquest, bent down
before the craft of Sharon Whipple. Sharon, with his competent iron in a
short half-arm swing--he could not, he said, trust the utensil beyond
the tail of his eye--sent the ball eighteen times not far but straight,
and with other iron shots coaxed it to the green, where he sank it with
quite respectable putting. Rapp, Senior, sliced his long drives
brilliantly into shaded grassy dells and scented forest glades, where he
trampled scores of pretty wild flowers as he chopped his way out again.
Rapp, Senior, made the course excitingly in one hundred and
thirty-eight; Sharon Whipple, playing along safe and sane lines, came
through with one hundred and thirty-five, and was a proud man, and
looked it, and was still so much prouder than he looked that he
shuddered lest it get out on him. Later he vanquished, by the same
tactics, other men who used the wooden driver with perfect form in
practice swings.
Contests in which he engaged, however, were likely to be marred by
regrettable asperities rising from Sharon's inability to grasp the nicer
subtleties of golf. It seemed silly to him not to lift his ball out of
some slight depression into which it had rolled quite by accident; not
to amend an unhappy lie in a sand trap; and he never came to believe
that a wild swing leaving the ball untouched should be counted as a
stroke. People who pettishly insisted upon these extremes of the game he
sneeringly called golf lawyers. When he said that he made a hole in
nine, he meant nine or thereabouts--approximately nine; nice people, he
thought, should let it go at that. So he became feared on the course,
not only for his actual prowess but for his matchless optimism in
casting up his score. He was a pleased man, and considered golf a good
game; and he never forgot that Wilbur Cowan had made him the golfer he
was. More than ever was he believing that Harvey D. Whipple had chosen
wrongly from available Cowans. On the day when he first made the Newbern
course in, approximately, one hundred and twenty--those short-arm iron
shots were beginning to lengthen down the centre of the fairway--he was
sure of it.
* * * * *
It must be said that Sharon was alone in this conviction. The others
most concerned, had he allowed it to be known, would have been amazed by
it--Winona Penniman most of all. Winona's conviction was that the
rejected Cowan twin conspicuously lacked those qualities that would make
him desirable for adoption by any family of note, certainly not by
Whipples. He had gone from bad to worse. Driving a truck had been bad.
There had been something to say in its favour in the early stages of his
career, until the neophyte had actually chosen to wear overalls like any
common driver. In overalls he could not be mistaken for a gentleman
amateur moved by a keen love for the sport of truck driving--and golf
was worse. Glad at first of this change in his life work, Winona had
been shocked to learn that golf kept people from the churches. And the
clothes, even if they did not include overalls, were not genteel. Wilbur
wore belted trousers of no distinction, rubber-soled sneakers of a
neutral tint, and a sweater now so low in tone that the precise
intention of its original shade was no longer to be divined. A rowdyish
cap completed the uniform. No competent bank president, surveying the
ensemble, would have for a moment considered making a bookkeeper out of
the wearer. He was farther than ever before, Winona thought, from a
career of Christian gentility in which garments of a Sabbath grandeur
are worn every day and proper care may be taken of the hands.
It was late in this summer that she enforced briefly a demand for
genteel raiment, and kept the boy up until ten-thirty of a sleepy
evening to manicure his nails. The occasion was nothing less than the
sixteenth birthday of Merle Whipple, to be celebrated by an afternoon
festivity on the grounds of his home. The brothers had met briefly and
casually during Merle's years as a Whipple; but this was to be an affair
of ceremony, and Winona was determined that the unworthy twin should--at
least briefly--appear as one not socially impossible.
She browbeat him into buying a suit such as those that are worn by
jaunty youths in advertisements, including haberdashery of supreme
elegance, the first patent-leather shoes worn by this particular Cowan,
and a hat of class. He murmured at the outlay upon useless finery. It
materially depleted his capital--stored with other treasure in a tin box
labelled "Cake" across its front. But Winona was tenacious. He murmured,
too, at the ordeal of manicuring, but Winona was insistent, and laboured
to leave him with the finger tips of one who did not habitually engage
in a low calling.
He fell asleep at the final polishing, even after trying to fix his gaze
upon the glittering nails of the hand Winona had relinquished, and while
she sought to impress him with the importance of the approaching
function. There would be present not only the Whipples, but their
guests, two girl friends of Patricia from afar and a school friend of
Merle's; there would be games and refreshment and social converse, and
Winona hoped he would remember not to say "darn it" any time in such of
the social converse as he provided; or forget to say, on leaving, what a
charming time it was and how nice every one had been to ask him. He
dozed through much of this instruction.
Yet Winona, the next day, felt repaid for her pains. Arrayed in the new
suit, with the modish collar and cravat, the luminous shoes and the hat
of merit, the boy looked entirely like those careless youths in the
pictures who so proudly proclaim the make of their garments. No one
regarding him would have dreamed that he was at heart but a golf caddie
or a driver of trucks for hire. Winona insisted upon a final polish of
his nails, leaving them with a dazzling pinkish glitter, and she sprayed
and anointed him with precious unguents, taking especial pains that his
unruly brown hair should lie back close to his head, to show the wave.
When he installed her beside him in Sharon Whipple's newest car, pressed
upon the youth by its owner for this occasion, she almost wished that
she had been a bit more daring in her own dress. It was white and neat,
but not fancy dressmaking in any sense of the word. She regretted for a
moment her decision against pink rosebuds for the hat, so warmly urged
by her mother, who kept saying nowadays that she would be a girl but
once. Winona was beginning to doubt this. At least you seemed to be a
girl a long time. She had been a little daring, though. Her stockings
were white and of a material widely heralded as silkona. Still her skirt
was of a decent length, so that she apprehended no scandal from this
recklessness.
When her genteel escort started the car and guided it by an apparently
careless winding of the wheel she felt a glow that was almost pride in
his appearance and nonchalant mastery of this abstruse mechanism. She
was frightened at the speed and at the narrow margin by which he missed
other vehicles and obtruding corners. When he flourished to an
impressive halt under the Whipple porte-cochère she felt a new respect
for him. If only he could do such things at odd moments as a gentleman
should, and not continuously for money, in clothes unlike those of the
expensive advertisements!
She descended from the car in a flutter of pretense that she habitually
descended from cars, and a moment later was overjoyed to note that her
escort sustained the greetings of the assembled Whipples and their
guests with a practiced coolness, or what looked like it. He shook hands
warmly with his brother and Patricia Whipple; was calm under the ordeal
of introductions to the little friends Winona had warned him of--two
girls of peerless beauty and a fair-haired, sleepy-looking boy with long
eyelashes and dimples.
[Illustration: "THE GIRL WAS ALREADY READING WILBUR'S PALM, DISCLOSING
TO HIM THAT HE HAD A DEEP VEIN OF CRUELTY IN HIS NATURE. PATRICIA
WHIPPLE LISTENED IMPATIENTLY TO THIS AND OTHER SINISTER REVELATIONS."]
These young people were dressed rather less formally than Winona had
expected, being mostly in flannels and ducks and tennis shoes not too
lately cleaned. She was instantly glad she had been particular as to
Wilbur's outfit. He looked ever so much more distinguished than either
Merle or his friend. She watched him as he stood unconcerned under the
chatter of the three girls. They had begun at once to employ upon him
the oldest arts known to woman, and he was not flustered or "gauche"--a
word Winona had lately learned. Beyond her divining was the truth that he
would much rather have been talking to Starling Tucker. She thought he was
merely trying to look bored, and was doing it very well.
The little friends of Patricia, and Patricia herself, could have told
her better. They knew he was genuinely bored, and redoubled their
efforts to enslave him. Merle chatted brightly with Winona, with such a
man-of-the-world air that she herself became flustered at the memory
that she had once been as a mother to him and drenched his handkerchief
with perfume on a Sabbath morning. The little male friend of Merle stood
by in silent relief. Patricia and her little guests had for three days
been doing to him what they now tried doing to the new boy; he was glad
the new boy had come. He had grown sulky under the incessant onslaughts.
The girl with black hair and the turquoise necklace was already reading
Wilbur's palm, disclosing to him that he had a deep vein of cruelty in
his nature. Patricia Whipple listened impatiently to this and other
sinister revelations. She had not learned palm reading, but now resolved
to. Meantime, she could and did stem the flood of character portrayal by
a suggestion of tennis. Patricia was still freckled, though not so
obtrusively as in the days of her lawlessness. Her skirt and her hair
were longer, the latter being what Wilbur Cowan later called rusty. She
was still active and still determined, however. No girl in her presence
was going to read interminably the palm of one upon whom she had, in a
way of speaking, a family claim, especially one of such distinguished
appearance and manners--apparently being bored to death by the attention
of mere girls.
Tennis resulted in a set of doubles, Merle and his little friend playing
Patricia and one of her little friends--the one with the necklace and
the dark eyes. The desirable new man was not dressed for tennis, and
could not have played it in any clothes whatever, and so had to watch
from the back line, where he also retrieved balls. Both girls had
insisted upon being at his end of the court. Their gentlemen opponents
were irritated by this arrangement, because the girls paid far more
attention to the new man than to the game itself. They delayed their
service to catch his last remark; delayed the game seriously by pausing
to chat with him. He retrieved balls for them, which also impeded
progress.
When he brought the balls to the dark-eyed girl she acknowledged his
courtesy with a pretty little "Thanks a lot!" Patricia varied this. She
said "Thanks a heap!" And they both rather glared at the other girl--a
mere pinkish, big-eyed girl whose name was Florrie--who lingered
stanchly by the new man and often kept him in talk when he should have
been watchful. Still this third girl had but little initiative. She did
insinuatingly ask Wilbur what his favourite flower was, but this got her
nowhere, because it proved that he did not know.
The gentlemen across the net presently became unruly, and would play no
more at a game which was merely intended, it seemed, to provide their
opponents with talk of a coquettish character. Wilbur ardently wished
that Winona could have been there to hear this talk, because the
peerless young things freely used the expletive "Darn!" after inept
strokes. Still they bored him. He would rather have been on the links.
He confessed at last to his little court that he much preferred golf to
tennis. Patricia said that she had taken up golf, and that he must coach
her over the Newbern course. The dark-eyed girl at once said that she
was about to take up golf, and would need even more coaching than
Patricia. Once they both searched him--while the game waited--for class
pins, which they meant to appropriate. They found him singularly devoid
of these. He never even knew definitely what they were looking for.
He was glad when refreshments were served on the lawn, and ate
sandwiches in a wholehearted manner that disturbed Winona, who felt that
at these affairs one should eat daintily, absently, as if elevated
converse were the sole object and food but an incident. Wilbur ate as if
he were hungry--had come there for food. Even now he was not free from
the annoying attentions of Patricia and her little friends. They not
only brought him other sandwiches and other cake and other lemonade,
which he could have condoned, but they chattered so incessantly at him
while he ate that only by an effort of concentration could he ignore
them for the food. Florrie said that he was brutal to women. She was
also heard to say--Winona heard it--that he was an awfully stunning
chap. Harvey D. Whipple was now a member of the party, beaming proudly
upon his son. And Sharon Whipple came presently to survey the group. He
winked at Wilbur, who winked in return.
After refreshments the young gentlemen withdrew to smoke. They withdrew
unostentatiously, through a pergola, round a clump of shrubbery, and on
to the stables, where Merle revealed a silver cigarette case, from which
he bestowed cigarettes upon them. They lighted these and talked as men
of the world.
"Those chickens make me sick," said the little friend of Merle quite
frankly.
"Me, too!" said Wilbur.
They talked of horses, Merle displaying his new thoroughbred in the box
stall, and of dogs and motor boats; and Merle and the other boy spoke
in a strange jargon of their prep school, where you could smoke if you
had the consent of your parents. Merle talked largely of his possessions
and gay plans.
They were presently interrupted by the ladies, who, having withdrawn
beyond the shrubbery clump to powder their noses from Florrie's gold
vanity box, had discovered the smokers, and now threatened to tell if
the gentlemen did not instantly return. So Merle's little friend said
wearily that they must go back to the women, he supposed. And there was
more tennis of a sort, more chatter. As Mrs. Harvey D. said, everything
moved off splendidly.
Winona, when they left, felt that her charge had produced a favourable
impression, and was amazed that he professed to be unmoved by this
circumstance, even after being told, as the noble car wheeled them
homeward, what the girl, Florrie, had said of him; and that Mrs. Harvey
D. Whipple had said she had always known he was a sweet boy. He merely
sniffed at the term and went on to disparage the little friends of
Patricia.
"You told me not to say 'darn,'" he protested, "but those girls all said
it about every other word."
"Not really?" said Winona, aghast.
"Darn this and darn that! And darn that ball! And darned old thing!"
insisted the witness, imitatively.
"Oh, dear!" sighed Winona.
She wondered if Patricia could be getting in with a fast set. She was
further worried about Patricia, because Miss Murtree, over the ice
cream, had confided to her that the girl was a brainless coquette; that
her highest ambition, freely stated, was to have a black velvet evening
gown, a black picture hat, and a rope of pearls. Winona did not impart
this item to Wilbur. He was already too little impressed with the
Whipple state. Nor did she confide to him the singular remark of Sharon
Whipple, delivered to her in hoarsely whispered confidence as Merle
spoke at length to the group about his new horse.
"Ain't he the most languageous critter!" had been Sharon's words.
And Winona had thought Merle spoke so prettily and with such easy
confidence. Instead of regaling Wilbur with this gossip she insinuated
his need for flannel trousers, sport shirts with rolling collars, tennis
shoes of white. She found him adamant in his resolve to buy no further
clothes which could have but a spectacular value.
To no one that day, except to Wilbur Cowan himself, had it occurred that
Merle Whipple's birthday would also be the birthday of his twin brother.
* * * * *
Winona hoped that some trace of the day's new elegance would survive
into Wilbur's professional life, but in this she suffered
disappointment. He refused to wear, save on state occasions, any of the
beautiful new garments, and again went forth in the cap and dingy
sneakers, the trousers without character, and the indeterminate sweater
which would persist in looking soiled even after relentless washing.
Not even for golf with Patricia Whipple would he sound a higher note in
apparel. Patricia came to the course, accompanied by the dark girl, who
said she was mad about golf, and over the eighteen holes each strove for
his exclusive attention. They bored him vastly. He became mad about golf
himself, because they talked noisily of other subjects and forgot his
directions, especially the dark girl, who was mad about a great many
things. She proved to be a trial. She was still so hopeless at the sport
that at each shot she had to have her hands placed for her in the
correct grip. The other two were glad when she was called home, so that
Patricia could enjoy the undivided attention of the coach. The coach was
glad, but only because his boredom was diminished by half; and Patricia,
after two mornings alone with him, decided that she knew all of golf
that was desirable.
The coach was too stubbornly businesslike; regarded her, she detected,
merely as someone who had a lot to learn about the game. And the going
of her little friend had taken a zest from the pursuit of this
determinedly golfing and unresponsive male. He was relieved when she
abandoned the sport and when he knew she had gone back to school.
Sometimes on the course when he watched her wild swings a trick of
memory brought her back to him as the bony little girl in his own
clothes--she was still bony, though longer--with her chopped-off hair
and boyish swagger. Then for a moment he would feel friendly, and smile
at her in comradeship, but she always spoiled this when she spoke in her
grand new manner of a grown-up lady.
Only Winona grieved when these golf sessions were no more. She wondered
if Patricia had not been shocked by some unguarded expression from
Wilbur. She had heard that speech becomes regrettably loose in the heat
of this sport. He sought to reassure her.
"I never said the least wrong thing," he insisted. "But she did, you
bet! 'Darn' and 'gosh' and everything like that, and you ought to have
heard her once when she missed an easy putt. She said worse than 'darn!'
She blazed out and said--"
"Don't tell me!" protested shuddering Winona. She wondered if Patricia's
people shouldn't be warned. She was now persuaded that golf endangered
the morals of the young. It had been bad enough when it seemed merely to
encourage the wearing of nondescript clothes. But if it led to
language--?
Yet she was fated to discover that the world offered worse than golf,
for Wilbur Cowan had not yet completed, in the process of his desultory
education, the out-of-doors curriculum offered by even the little world
of Newbern. He was to take up an entirely new study, with the
whole-hearted enthusiasm that had made him an adept at linotypes, gas
engines, and the sport of kings. Not yet, in Winona's view, had he
actually gone down into the depths of social obliquity; but she soon
knew he had made the joyous descent.
The dreadful secret was revealed when he appeared for his supper one
evening with a black eye. That is, it would have been known technically
as a black eye--even Winona knew what to call it. Actually it was an eye
of many colours, shading delicately from pale yellow at the edge to
richest variegated purple at the centre. The eye itself--it was the
right--was all but closed by the gorgeously puffed tissue surrounding
it, and of no practical use to its owner. The still capable left eye,
instead of revealing concern for this ignominy, gleamed a lively pride
in its overwhelming completeness. The malign eye was worn proudly as a
badge of honour, so proudly that the wearer, after Winona's first outcry
of horror, bubbled vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma by
stepping into one of Spike Brennon's straight lefts. Nothing less than
that!
Winona, conceiving that this talk was meant to describe an accident of
the most innocent character, demanded further details; wishing to be
told what a straight left was; why a person named Spike Brennon kept
such things about; and how Wilbur had been so careless as to step into
one. She instinctively pictured a straight left to be something like an
open door into which the victim had stepped in the dark. Her
enlightenment was appalling. When the boy had zestfully pictured with
pantomime of the most informing sort she not only knew what a straight
left was, but she knew that Wilbur Cowan, in stepping into one--in
placing himself where by any chance he could step into one--had flung
off the ultimate restraint of decency.
It amounted to nothing less, she gathered, than that her charge had
formed a sinister alliance with a degraded prize-fighter, a low bully
who for hire and amid the foulest surroundings pandered to the basest
instincts of his fellowmen by disgusting exhibitions of brute force. As
if that were not enough, this low creature had fallen lower in the
social scale, if that were possible, by tending bar in the unspeakable
den of Pegleg McCarron. It was of no use for Wilbur to explain to her
that his new hero chose this humble avocation because it afforded him
leisure for training between his fights; that he didn't drink or smoke,
but kept himself in good condition; that it was a fine chance to learn
how to box, because Spike needed sparring partners.
"Oh, it's terrible!" cried Winona. "A debased creature like that!"
"You ought to see him stripped!" rejoined the boy in quick pride.
This closed the interview. Later she refused more than a swift glance of
dismay at the photograph of the bully proudly displayed to her by the
recipient. With one eye widened in admiration, he thrust it without
warning full into her gaze, whereupon she had gaspingly fled, not even
noting the inscription of which the boy was especially proud: "To my
friend, Mr. Wilbur Cowan, from his friend, Eddie--Spike--Brennon, 133
lbs. ringside." It was a spirited likeness of the hero, though taken
some years before, when he was in the prime of a ring career now, alas,
tapering to obscurity.
Spike stood with the left shoulder slightly raised, the left foot
advanced, the slightly bent left arm with its clenched fist suggestively
extended. His head was slanted to bring his chin down and in. The right
shoulder was depressed, and the praiseworthy right arm lay in watchful
repose across his chest. The tense gaze expressed absolute singleness of
purpose--a hostile purpose. These details were lost upon Winona. She had
noted only that the creature's costume consisted of the flags of the
United States and Ireland tastefully combined to form a simple loin
cloth. Had she raised the boy for this?
* * * * *
The deplored intimacy had begun on a morning when Wilbur was early
abroad salvaging golf balls from certain obscure nooks of the course
where Newbern's minor players were too likely to abandon the search for
them on account of tall grass, snakes, poison ivy, and other deterrents.
Along the course at a brisk trot had come a sweatered figure, with cap
pulled low, a man of lined and battered visage, who seemed to trot with
a purpose, and yet with a purpose not to be discerned, for none
pursued him and he appeared to pursue no one.
[Illustration: "THE MALIGN EYE WAS WORN SO PROUDLY THAT THE WEARER
BUBBLED VAINGLORIOUSLY OF HOW HE HAD ACHIEVED THE STIGMA BY STEPPING
INTO ONE OF SPIKE BRENNON'S STRAIGHT LEFTS."]
He had stopped amiably to chat with the boy. He was sweating profusely,
and chewed gum. It may be said that he was not the proud young Spike
Brennon of the photograph. He was all of twenty-five, and his later
years had told. Where once had been the bridge of his nose was now a
sharp indentation. One ear was weirdly enlarged; and his mouth, though
he spoke through narrowly opened lips, glittered in the morning sun with
the sheen of purest gold. Wilbur Cowan was instantly enmeshed by this
new personality.
The runner wished to know what he was looking for. Being told golf
balls, he demanded "What for?" It seemed never to have occurred to him
that there would be an object in looking for golf balls. He curiously
handled and weighed a ball in his brown and hairy hand.
"So that's the little joker, is it? I often seen 'em knockin' up flies
with it, but I ain't never been close to one. Say, that pill could hurt
you if it come right!"
He was instructed briefly in the capacity of moving balls to inflict
pain, and more particularly as to their market value. As the boy talked
the sweating man looked him over with shrewd, half-shut eyes.
"Ever had the gloves on, kid?" he demanded at last.
It appeared in a moment that he meant boxing gloves; not gloves in which
to play golf.
"No, sir," said Wilbur.
"You look good. Come down to the store at three o'clock. Mebbe you can
give me a work-out."
Quite astonishingly it appeared then that when he said the store he was
meaning the low saloon of Pegleg McCarron; that he did road work every
morning and wanted quick young lads to give him a work-out with the
gloves in the afternoon, because even dubs was better than shadow boxing
or just punching the bag all the time. If they couldn't box-fight they
could wrestle.
So Wilbur had gone to the store that afternoon, and for many succeeding
afternoons, to learn the fascinating new game in a shed that served
McCarron as storeroom. The new hero had here certain paraphernalia of
his delightful calling--a punching bag, small dumb-bells, a skipping
rope, boxing gloves. Here the neophyte had been taught the niceties of
feint and guard and lead, of the right cross, the uppercut, the straight
left, to duck, to side-step, to shift lightly on his feet, to stop
protruding his jaw in cordial invitation, to keep his stomach covered.
He proved attentive and willing and quick. He was soon chewing gum as
Spike Brennon chewed it, and had his hair clipped in Brennon manner. He
lived his days and his nights in dreams of delivering or evading blows.
Often while dressing of a morning he would stop to punish an invisible
opponent, doing an elaborate dance the while. It was better than
linotypes or motor busses.
In the early days of this new study he had been fearful of hurting Spike
Brennon. He felt that his blows were too powerful, especially that from
the right fist when it should curve over Spike's left shoulder to stop
on his jaw. But he learned that when his glove reached the right place
Spike's jaw had for some time not been there. Spike scorned his efforts.
"Stop it, kid! You might as well send me a pitcher postcard that it's
comin'. You got to hit from where you are--you can't stop to draw back.
Use your left more. G'wan now, mix it! Mix it!"
They would mix it until the boy was panting. Then while he sat on a beer
keg until he should be in breath again the unwinded Spike would skip the
rope--a girl's skipping rope--or shadow-box about the room with
intricate dance steps, raining quick blows upon a ghostly boxer who was
invariably beaten; or with smaller gloves he would cause the inflated
bag to play lively tunes upon the ceiling of its support. After an hour
of this, when both were sweating, they would go to a sheltered spot
beyond the shed to play cold water upon each other's soaped forms.
There had been six weeks of this before the boy's dreadful secret was
revealed to Winona; six weeks before he appeared to startle her with one
eye radiating the rich hues of a ripened eggplant. It had been simple
enough. He had seen his chance to step in and punish Spike, and he had
stepped--and Spike's straight left had been there.
"You handed yourself that one, kid," Spike had said, applying raw beef
to it after their rubdown.
Wilbur had removed the beef after leaving the store. He didn't want the
thing to go down too soon. It was an honourable mark, wasn't it? Nothing
to make the fuss about that Winona had made. Of course you had to go to
Pegleg McCarron's to do the boxing, but Spike had warned him never to
drink if he expected to get anywhere in this particular trade; not even
to smoke. That he had entirely abandoned the use of tobacco at Spike's
command should--he considered--have commended his hero to Winona's
favourable notice. He wore the eye proudly in the public gaze; regretted
its passing as it began to pale into merely rainbow tints.
But Winona took steps. She was not going to see him die, perish morally,
without an effort to save him. She decided that Sharon Whipple would be
the one to consult. Sharon liked the boy--had taken an interest in him.
Perhaps words in time from him might avert the calamity, especially
after her father had refused to be concerned.
"Prize fighting!" said the judge, scornfully. "What'll he be doing next?
Never settles down to anything. Jack-of-all-trades and good at none."
It was no use hoping for help from a man who thought fighting was
foolish for the boy merely because he would not earnestly apply himself
to it.
She went to Sharon Whipple, and Sharon listened even more
sympathetically than she had hoped he would. He seemed genuinely shocked
that such things had been secretly going on in the life of his young
friend. He clicked deprecatingly with his tongue as Winona became
detailed in her narrative.
"My great glory!" he exclaimed at last. "You mean to say they mix it
down there every afternoon?"
"Every single day," confirmed Winona. "He's been going to that low dive
for weeks and weeks. Think of the debasing associations!"
"Just think of it!" said Sharon, impatiently. "Every afternoon--and me
not hearing a word of it!"
"If you could only say a word to him," besought Winona. "Coming from you
it might have an influence for good."
"I will, I will!" promised Sharon, fervently, and there was a gleam of
honest determination in his quick old eyes.
That very afternoon, in Pegleg McCarron's shed, he said words to Wilbur
that might have an influence for good.
"Quit sticking your jaw out that way or he'll knock it off!" had been
his first advice. And again: "Cover up that stomach--you want to get
killed?" He was sitting at one end of the arena, on a plank supported by
the ends of two beer kegs, and he held open a large, thick, respectable
gold watch. "Time!" he called.
Beside him sat the red-eyed and disreputable Pegleg McCarron, who
whacked the floor with the end of his crutch from time to time in
testimony of his low pleasure.
The round closed with one of Wilbur Cowan's right crosses--started from
not too far back--landing upon the jaw of Spike Brennon with what seemed
to be a shattering impact. Sharon Whipple yelled and Pegleg McCarron
pounded the floor in applause. Spike merely shook his head once.
"The kid's showing speed," he admitted, cordially. "If he just had
something back of them punches!"
"It was a daisy!" exclaimed Sharon. "My suffering stars, what a daisy!"
"'Twas neatly placed!" said Pegleg.
"I'm surprised at you!" said Sharon later to the panting apprentice.
"I'm surprised and grieved! You boys mixing it here every day for weeks
and never letting on!"
"I never thought you'd like it," said Wilbur.
"Like it!" said Sharon. He said it unctuously. "And say, don't you let
on to Miss Penniman that I set here and held the watch for you. I ain't
wanting that to get out on me."
"No, sir," said Wilbur.
Later Sharon tried to avoid Winona one day on River Street, but when he
saw that she would not be avoided he met her like a man.
"I've reasoned with the boy from time to time," he confessed, gloomily,
"but he's self-headed, talking huge high about being a good lightweight
and all that. I don't know--mebbe I haven't taken just the right tack
with him yet."
Winona thought him curiously evasive in manner. She believed that he
feared the worst for the boy, but was concealing it from her.
"His eye is almost well where that cowardly bully struck him," she told
Sharon. "If only we could get him into something where he could hold his
head up."
"He does that too much now," began Sharon, impulsively, but stopped,
floundering. "I mean he ain't enough ashamed," he concluded feebly, and
feigned that someone had called him imperatively from the door of the
First National Bank.
From time to time Spike's boxing manner grew tense for a period of days.
He tightened up, as Sharon put it, and left a sore and battered
apprentice while he went off to some distant larger town to fight,
stepping nonchalantly aboard the six-fifty-eight with his fighting
trunks and shoes wrapped in a copy of the Newbern _Advance_, and
shifting his gum as he said good-bye to Wilbur, who would come down to
see him off.
Sometimes Spike returned from these sorties unscathed and with money.
Oftener he came back without money and with a face--from abrasive
thrusts--looking as if a careless golfer had gone over him and neglected
to replace the divots. After these times there were likely to follow
complicated episodes of dentistry at the office of Doctor Patten. These
would render the invincible smile of Spike more refulgent than ever.
The next birthday of Merle Whipple was celebrated at a time when Spike
had been particularly painstaking in view of an approaching combat. Not
only did he leave his young friend with an eye that compelled the
notice, an eye lavishly displaying all the tints yet revealed by
spectroscopic analysis, and which by itself would have rendered him
socially undesirable, but he bore a swollen nose and a split and puffy
lip; bore them proudly, it should be said, and was not enough cast down,
in Winona's opinion, that his shameful wounds would deter him from
mingling with decent folk. Indeed, Winona had to be outspoken before she
convinced him that a birthday party was now no place for him. He would
have gone without misgiving, and would have pridefully recounted the
sickening details of that last round in which Spike Brennon had
permitted himself to fancy he faced a veritable antagonist. Still he
cared little for the festivity.
He saw Patricia from a distance in River Street, but pulled the dingy
cap lower and avoided her notice. She was still bony and animated and
looked quite capable of commanding his attendance over eighteen holes of
the most utterly futile golf in all the world. His only real regret in
the matter of his facial blemishes was that Spike came back with the
mere loser's end of an inconsiderable purse, and had to suffer another
infliction of the most intricate bridge work at the hands of Doctor
Patten before he could properly enjoy at the board of T-bone Tommy that
diet so essential to active men of affairs.