Cheerful-By Request Part 9

Suddenly, "There she is again!" shrilled Minnie, from her bedroom. Buzz shrank back in his chair. Old man Werner, with a muttered oath, went to the open doorway and stood there, puffing savage little spurts of smoke streetward. The Kearney girl stared brazenly at him as she strolled slowly by, a slim and sinister figure. Old man Werner watched her until she pa.s.sed out of sight.

"You go gettin' mixed up with dirt like that," threatened he, "and I'll learn you. She'll be hangin' around the mill yet, the bra.s.s-faced thing.

If I hear of it I'll get the foreman to put her off the place. You'll stay home to-night. Carry a pail of water for your ma once."

"Carry it yourself."

Buzz, with a wary eye up the street, slouched out to the front porch, into the twilight of the warm May evening. Charley Lembke, from his porch across the street, called to him: "Goin' down town?"

"Yeh, I guess so."

"Ain't you afraid of bein' pinched?" Buzz turned his head quickly toward the room just behind him. He turned to go in. Charley's voice came again, clear and far-reaching. "I hear you had a run-in with Hatton's son, and knocked him down. Some cla.s.s t' you, Buzz, even if it does cost you your job."

From within the sound of a newspaper hurled to the floor. Pa Werner was at the door. "What's that! What's that he's sayin'?"

Buzz, cornered, jutted a threatening jaw at his father and brazened it out. "Can't you hear good?"

"Come on in here."

Buzz hesitated a moment. Then he turned, slowly, and walked into the little sitting room with an attempt at a swagger that failed to convince even himself. He leaned against the side of the door, hands in pockets.

Pa Werner faced him, black-browed. "Is that right, what he said? Lembke?

Huh?"

"Sure it's right. I had a run-in with Hatton, an' licked him, and give'm my time. What you goin' to do about it?"

Ma Werner was in the room, now. Minnie, pa.s.sing through on her way to work again, caught the electric current of the storm about to break and escaped it with a parting:

"Oh, for the land's sakes! You two. Always a-fighting."

The two men faced each other. The one a st.u.r.dy man-boy nearing twenty, with a great pair of shoulders and a clear eye, a long, quick arm and a deft hand--these last his a.s.sets as a workman. The other, gnarled, prematurely wrinkled, almost gnome-like. This one took his pipe from between his lips and began to speak. The drink he had had at Wenzel's on the way home sparked his speech.

He began with a string of epithets. They flowed from his lips, an acid stream. Pick and choose as I will, there is none that can be repeated here. Old Man Werner had, perhaps, been something of a tough guy himself, in his youth. As he reviled his son now you saw that son, at fifty, just such another stocking-footed, bitter old man, smoking a glum pipe on the back porch, summer evenings, and spitting into the fresh young gra.s.s.

I don't say that this thought came to Buzz as his father flayed him with his abuse. But there was something unusual, surely, in the non-resistance with which he allowed the storm to beat about his head.

Something in his steady, unruffled gaze caused the other man to falter a little in his tirade, and finally to stop, almost apprehensively. He had paid no heed to Ma Werner's attempts at pacification. "Now, Pa!" she had said, over and over, her hand on his arm, though he shook it off again and again. "Now, Pa!--" But he stopped now, fist raised in a last profane period. Buzz stood regarding him with his unblinking stare.

Finally: "You through?" said Buzz.

"Ya-as," snarled Pa, "I'm through. Get to h.e.l.l out of here. You'll be hung yet, you loafer. A good-for-nothing b.u.m, that's what. Get out o'

here!"

"I'm gettin'," said Buzz. He took his hat off the hook and wiped it carefully with the lower side of his sleeve, round and round. He placed it on his head, jauntily. He stepped to the kitchen, took a tooth-pick from the little red-and-white gla.s.s holder on the table, and--with this emblem of insouciance, at an angle of ninety, between his teeth--strolled indolently, nonchalantly down the front steps, along the cement walk to the street and so toward town. The two old people, left alone in the sudden silence of the house, stared after the swaggering figure until the dim twilight blotted it out. And a sinister something seemed to close its icy grip about the heart of one of them. A vague premonition that she could only feel, not express, made her next words seem futile.

"Pa, you oughtn't to talked to him like that. He's just a little wild.

He looked so kind of funny when he went out. I don'no, he looked so kind of--"

"He looked like the b.u.m he is, that's what. No respect for nothing. For his pa, or ma, or nothing. Down on the corner with the rest of 'em, that's where he's goin'. Hatton ain't goin' to let this go by. You see."

But she, on her way to the kitchen, repeated, "I don'no, he looked so kind of funny. He looked so kind of--"

Considering all things--the happenings of the past few hours, at least--Buzz, as he strolled on down toward Grand Avenue with his sauntering, care-free gait, did undoubtedly look kind of funny. The red-hot rage of the afternoon and the white-hot rage of the evening had choked the furnace of brain and soul with clinkers so that he was thinking unevenly and disconnectedly. On the surface he was cool and unruffled. He stopped for a moment at the railroad tracks to talk with Stumpy Gans, the one-legged gateman. The little bell above Stumpy's shanty was ringing its warning, so he strolled leisurely over to the depot platform to see the 7:15 come in from Chicago. When the train pulled out Buzz went on down the street. His mind was darting here and there, planning this revenge, discarding it; seizing on another, abandoning that. He'd show'm. He'd show'm. Sick of the whole d.a.m.n bunch, anyway.... Wonder was Hatton going to raise a s.h.i.+ndy.... Let'm. Who cares?... The old man was a drunk, that's what.... Ma had looked kinda sick....

He put that uncomfortable thought out of his mind and slammed the door on it. Anyway, he'd show'm.

Out of the shadows of the great trees in front of the Aga.s.siz School stepped the Kearney girl, like a lean and hungry cat. One hand clutched his arm.

Buzz jumped and said something under his breath. Then he laughed, shortly. "Might as well kill a guy as scare him to death!"

She thrust one hand through his arm and linked it with the other. "I've been waiting for you, Buzz."

"Yeh. Well, let me tell you something. You quit traipsing up and down in front of my house, see?"

"I wanted to see you. An' I didn't know whether you was coming down town to-night or not."

"Well, I am. So now you know." He pulled away from her, but she twined her arm the tighter about his.

"Ain't sore at me, are yuh, Buzz?"

"No. Leggo my arm."

"If you're sore because I been foolin' round with that little wart of a Donahue--" She turned wise eyes up to him, trying to make them limpid in the darkness.

"What do I care who you run with?"

"Don't you care, Buzz?" The words were soft but there was a steel edge to her utterance.

"No."

"Oh, Buzz, I'm batty about you. I can't help it, can I? H'm? Look here, you go on to Grand, and hang around for an hour, maybe, and I'll meet you here an' we'll walk a ways. Will you? I got something to tell you."

"Naw, I can't to-night. I'm busy."

And then the steel edge cut. "Buzz, if you turn me down I'll have you up."

"Up?"

"Before old Colt. I can fix up charges. He'll believe it. Say, he knows me, Judge Colt does. I can name you an'--"

"Me!" Sheer amazement rang in his voice. "Me? You must be crazy. I ain't had anything to do with you. You make me sick."

"That don't make any difference. You can't prove it. I told you I was crazy about you. I told you--"

He jerked loose from her then and was off. He ran one block. Then, after a backward glance, fell into a quick walk that brought him past the Brill House and to Schroeder's drug store corner. There was his crowd--Spider, and Red, and Bing, and Casey. They took him literally unto their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. They thumped him on the back. They bestowed on him the low epithets with which they expressed admiration. Red worked at one of the bleaching vats in the Hatton paper mill. The story of Buzz's fistic triumph had spread through the big plant like a flame.

"Go on, Buzz, tell 'em about it," Red urged, now. "Je's, I like to died laughing when I heard it. He must of looked a sight, the poor b.o.o.b. Go on, Buzz, tell 'em how you says to him he must be a kind of delicate piece of--you know; go on, tell 'em."

Buzz hitched himself up with a characteristic gesture, and plunged into his story. His audience listened entranced, interrupting him with an occasional "Je's!" of awed admiration. But the thing seemed to lack a certain something. Perhaps Casey put his finger on that something when, at the recital's finish he asked:

"Didn't he see you was goin' to hit him?"