"Well, this was the way it happened, Pat. David picked up a big rock and threw it at the Red Bat, but the Red Bat was too smart for him. The Red Bat caught the rock and threw it back at David and knocked him down. That was it, wasn't it?" "Yes," said Pat. When Kate returned a little after one Peter reported, "I didn't have any bother with him. He just went right off to sleep." II David and Goliath became set as a bedtime story and lasted through the next six months almost without change. Indeed Pat resented changes. "Once," Peter would begin, "there was a man named Goliath and he was the biggest man in the world and he could lick any man in the world." "Not lick," Pat would interrupt. "Beat." "Oh, yes, he could beat any man in the world." Peter found himself coming home for Pat's bedtime with increasing frequency. Once or twice he tried to break away, but upon such occasions Kate reported that the child had cried for him and had kept awake until after midnight asking for the story of David and Goliath. "You tell it to him," said Peter. "I think I can teach it to you. He wants it just this way." And he repeated the accepted version. Kate shook her head. "I'm too old a woman to be learning so many words, Mr. Neale," she said. "And it's not a story I think Father Ryan would like me to be telling. That's not the way the story do be going in our Bible." "Gosh," thought Peter to himself. "She thinks it was Martin Luther made those changes." Notwithstanding Goliath, Peter made a gallant attempt to break away from his newly found responsibilities. He felt that he ought to. He felt that in the restaurants and poolrooms there lay the sort of sporting gossip he ought to pick up for his column. Of course, not all New York kept Pat's hours in those days but there was something almost auto-hypnotic in getting the child to sleep. In addition to the bedtime story, Peter found it necessary to feign great weariness in order to suggest a similar feeling in Pat. He would yawn prodigiously immediately after the Red Bat had knocked down David and pretend to doze off on the foot of Pat's bed. Presently, he would hear the boy's regular breathing and would tiptoe out of the room. But Peter acted his rôle much too well. After so much shamming he generally was actually tired himself and indisposed to wander down to Jack's or any of the other places where he might find fighters or their managers.