Winner Take All Part 11

Montague ignored him.

He challenged Holliday, and he was afraid of Holliday, too. And Holliday made game of him noisily.

"What'll it get me to fight you?" he wanted to know. "If I stub me toe and fall down, somebody'll raise a yelp that you bought me off. Not me! Us girls has got to be careful. Besides, I'm looking for a battle with the real champ."

It can't be done? Oh, they did it.

The night that Cecille Manners had hysterics and Felicity was hurrying because she knew that Fiegenspann would "bawl her out" if she was very late, Perry Blair had been standing from eleven o'clock until a quarter to twelve on the corner of Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, too proud to turn the collar of his light coat up against the winter cold, too broke to buy a heavy one. He'd almost decided to hunt a job, anything that would bring enough to take him back home. The Dream? Girl o'

Mine? It hurt his throat to think of these,--made him blink his eyes.

So they had undermined him.

He was standing on a corner wondering what it was all about. But in that last three-quarters of an hour he had achieved something at least, a terse sentence that must, it seems, epitomize the sentiments of every idol who ever shared his predicament, every king who ever lacked a throne.

He nodded his head over it, and voiced it pensively.

"It's a great world," he muttered, "if you don't weaken."

Then he saw that she would very likely be killed if someone didn't do something about it besides shout. He weighed the chances, in an infinitesimal fraction of a second, and decided they were such that any good gambler could scarcely ignore. So he bunched his muscles and sprang.

Felicity's taxi had met a traffic tie-up at Forty-seventh Street which made further direct advance impossible. In obedience to her plain request for haste the driver had tried it to the west, found that way cut off, and so detoured to the east. When, however, he wriggled up to Broadway on Forty-fourth Street he had met with no better luck.

Here was a din of horns, of racing motors, of harried traffic police.

But not much chance of progress. So Felicity paid him and stepped off the running-board into the thick of it to have a try on foot at the very moment when the nearest officer thought to have it cleared.

He raised an arm and roared, bull-voiced:

"Come on there, now!"

And promptly the drivers of the two cars which had been at the heart of the snarl, like key logs in a jam, both heckled, both in the wrong and filled with unsaid things, trod harshly upon their accelerators.

Wire-wheeled sedan and lemon-tinted limousine, up-town bound and cross-town bound, they leaped simultaneously forward, as Felicity stepped between.

Bystanders screamed so efficiently that their shrill tumult drowned the wail of overtaxed brakedrums. But that would have helped Felicity little. Nor could the brakes, for that matter. The lunging start had been too strong, the s.p.a.ce too short to stop in.

Perry Blair, about whom those who screamed had heard something unpleasant--oh, yes, yellow!--lanced down the narrowing aisle between radiator and fenders. He struck Felicity like a vicious tackler yet did not go down, but leaped again. As the cars crunched together they slithered through the crowd, across the walk, against a wall, into a heap. And the fall hurt Perry a little, even accustomed as he was to the taking of blows yieldingly. He was slow to rise. The girl was quickly up.

"Last down!" she gasped, but her exclamation was somewhat pallid like her wit. "Hold 'em, Yale!"

Then, while she still faltered, uncertain, shaken, the occupant of the lemon-tinted limousine came swiftly to her. He was a great hulk of a man, yet light on his feet with that nimbleness which seems often astonis.h.i.+ng in huge people.

"Let me put you in my car, Miss Brown," he begged, "and set you safely across. Not badly bruised, I trust?"

She gave him a flash of a glance and gasped again, but this time inaudibly. His ease with her name did not surprise her. He'd seen her often enough to know that. But this, she realized, was the first time that she had really been impressed upon him. Not too steadily, therefore, that she might need a.s.sistance, she let him help her back across the sidewalk, to the car, and thus away. Pig-iron Dunham? Of course. Knowing Felicity there is small cause to wonder that she went without even remembering to thank her rescuer.

He was getting up now, the target of few eyes. Most of those who lingered at all were staring after Dunham, Felicity and the lemon limousine. And Perry was congratulating himself, even while with an odd, detached expression he watched them go, that he had damaged but little his clothing, when a hand fell on his sleeve.

Perry turned to find a reporter, Hamilton by name, peering at him quizzically.

"Forgot to thank you, did she?" he laughed. "Oh, well, better come along over to the Roof with me and watch her caper, and give her another chance."

Perry didn't know whether he liked Hamilton or not, but he didn't instinctively distrust him.

"Who is she?" he asked.

"You really don't know?"

"I don't know many girls in this town."

"Hm-m-m," said Hamilton. "Thought everybody knew her. Felicity Brown.

Aero Octet." And he repeated his invitation.

"She'll want to thank you for preventing damage to life or limb." He couldn't have said exactly what made him voice the rest, unless it was the way the boy's eyes had followed her.

"And believe me, damage to life or limb, it would have been an equal catastrophe to Felicity. Come on along."

Perry hung back.

"Don't you know," he hesitated, "that you can lose your reputation just from being seen talking to me?"

Hamilton laughed again. He saw, however, that Perry's mind was not upon what he was saying. And who shall say when fancy first was bred?

Not you--or I--or even Hamilton. But the latter might have hazarded a shrewd guess. And a man, it would seem, has a little excuse for falling in love with a girl with Felicity's looks, whose life he just has saved.

"Come along," urged Hamilton. "I want to hear about that mess. I've been six months in Mexico." But he eyed the boy with deeper curiosity as they crossed Broadway.

"Who was the man?"

Perry spoke just once to ask that question, before they left the white-lit street for the elevator.

"Dunham."

Yet somehow Hamilton was sure that the other had known all along. And the quizzical eyes became malicious. If the boy was falling in love with Felicity he antic.i.p.ated with glee unholy complications. Dunham's alacrity at the scene of the accident no man could underestimate.

Pig-iron Dunham didn't, indiscriminately, beg young ladies to let the limousine bear them across Broadway in safety, or anywhere else, for that matter.

And yet, some hours later, when he had left Perry Blair waiting for Felicity at the mouth of the alley which ran back to the Roof's stage door, Hamilton found himself with little relish for the complications which he had so wisely foreseen. Perry's story of the trouble with Devereau and Dunham he had had in full, and believed. He had wanted to do something and realized that there was not much which he could do.

And now this. It was funny--but it wasn't so d.a.m.ned funny either.

Why, the kid was just--well, just a kid. And Felicity had been sweet to him. Very sweet and simple, in spite of his own none too well curbed sarcasm. Under Dunham's eye--because she knew that Dunham's eye was always upon her--she had sat long at their table, a slim thing in new-gra.s.s green, so prettily grateful that she suggested pink sashes and dimity. And Felicity wasn't a pink-sash-and-dimity girl. Hamilton knew that. But did Perry Blair? Just a kid! Dammitt! But n.o.body, not even a kid, had any right monkeying with Broadway, or Felicity, if he couldn't take care of himself.

Yet Hamilton, after he had said good-night, lingered a while. And again--immediately--something which he had antic.i.p.ated came to pa.s.s.

The lemon limousine was waiting at the curb. And Dunham stepped out of it, again with his preposterous nimbleness, when Felicity appeared. He stood holding wide the door. But the girl gave him only a nice little nod. She slipped her hand happily into the crook of Perry's arm.

Hamilton had a glimpse of Pig-iron Dunham's face.

"Hooked!" he exclaimed. "Hooked!"

But he had a good look at Perry Blair's too, as the pair pa.s.sed.