Harry laid a silver half-dollar in her tambourine and his companion did
the same, when the waiter who had served them spoke to her: "Clear out,
you. You've got your money, now go."
"And be quick about it!" said Harry, distinctly.
The remark had not the excuse of proprietorship and it roused fury in
the sluggish minds about them to whom the addition was extraneous and
gratuitous, a smug insult of one who from his manner belonged to a
class that despised them, offered to one whose daily habit proved that
she did not. With an oath the drunken teamster of the pock-marked
visage lurched forward, rolling a red-flannel sleeve along a hairy
biceps.
The dingy Ganymede thrust him back. "Leave him to me!" he ground
savagely, and turning, struck at Harry with envenomed force.
The fist, however, did not reach home. Harry's brain and eye were
working with the deadly precision of the practised athlete. The
suggestion of combat was complete, and with sober caution and reason
dead, the bodily mechanism rushed to meet it. There was a
lightning-like parry--a crisp, smashing return blow. Then suddenly the
room turned a shambles, a red surging mass of hands that tore, of
thrown missiles, of shattering glass, through which sounded a shrill
whistle and the tattoo of a thorn-baton on the pavement outside.
Two minutes later Harry stood unhurt in the open air, and a blue-jacket
held the door against a cursing pandemonium. "_Run_, you fool!" he
panted. "I can't hold it but a minute. _Run_!"
And Harry ran. Not from fear or dread, but in instant response to that
mental spur, without reason, or logic, or conscious thought. The new
mental formula for the present moment superseded the old. The dingy
saloon, the effervescent young Thespian, the fight--all fell away, were
gone, and there was only the rigid empty calm through which he sped,
and far above him the sound of a wind like a silken sea. It was close
on midnight, the more decorous streets into which he presently emerged
deserted, for intermittent clouds were now blotting the moonlight and a
sprinkle of rain was falling. The sparse pedestrians stared or shrank
away, but none followed, no patrolling guardian of the law forbade. He
ran without direction or purpose, until suddenly--he halted.
He had come to the side of a great enclosure, the grounds of a mansion,
surrounded by a high stone wall with tiled top, in which was set a gate
with tall posts holding dim-lit yellow globes. It was not at these,
however, that Harry was looking; his gaze went beyond, where, touched
by the rainy moonlight, stretched the long façade of a Colonial house
with a wide oval porch. At one side was a wing, with a lattice
climbing over its doorway, and the damp air was full of the scent of
jessamine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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