“There’s a whole lot of ‘otherwises,’ these days,” commented Stage. “Some of ’em pleading business and some playing sick.”
“If you are questioning my courage, Mr. Stage,” sternly interposed Dad, emptying his whisky-skin at a gulp, “let me tell you that when I was in Mexico—”
“Mexico,” echoed the cripple, chuckling as at some pleasant memory. “That’s right, Mexico. I’d forgot. You held a commission of some sort in our war down there, didn’t you? Queer you never showed it to any of us. It’d be interesting to see. Did you stay out the whole war? I disremember, just now. Or did you skedaddle before it was over?”
A furtive snicker ran through the little knot of loungers. Someone guffawed.
Dad swept the assemblage with an eye whose hint of bleariness had momentarily been burned away by a blaze that startled them all.
Then, settling his hat farther forward on his head, he strode out into the street without answering. As he passed through the swing-door he heard Stage’s wheezy voice announce to nobody in particular:
“I guess that’s the time I scored one—or maybe a couple or more—on Mr. James Brinton, Esq. Another time he won’t crow quite so loud, now that I’ve took him down a peg. He needn’t think he can be cock-of-the-walk over us all the time. Him that slunk back here in rags fourteen years ago, after he was kicked out of the army for drunk and disorderly!”
The departing listener winced as he shuffled away out of ear-shot.
It was one thing to know that all the neighborhood must be aware of his past. It was another to have the knowledge supplemented by auricular proof. And the words, chuckled unctuously from between old Stage’s misfit teeth-sets, stung like so many hornets.
Fourteen years! It had been so long—so unbelievably long. Surely their space might well have dimmed the memory of a dead-and-gone disgrace. He himself—except at excruciating moments like this—had taught himself to forget. Why couldn’t others—especially such of them as consistently used the same form of bottled nepenthe as did he?