“What have you got up your sleeve, Tom?” she asked abruptly, handing Duke her silver matchbox in response to a gestured request for it.
“My arm,” Tom responded promptly, pushing back his wristband to give her the proof.
“Aw, cut out the comedy, Tom. You’ve been doing something that you’re holding out on us. I know that look in your eye; I ought, having you and Lance to watch. You’re near enough to double in a lead and not even the manager know which is who. You’ve been doing something, and 119 Lance knows what it is. Now, I’ll get it outa you two if I have to shoot it out.”
Lance, just returned from Berkeley during Easter holidays, lifted one eyebrow at Tom, lowered one lid very slowly, and gave his mother a level, sidelong glance.
“Your husband, my dear madame, has been engaged in a melodramatic role created by himself. He is painfully undecided whether the hisses of the orchestra attest his success as a villian; whether the whistling up in the gallery demands an encore, or heralds an offering of cabbages and ripe poultry fruit. I myself did not witness the production, but I did chance to meet the star just as he was leaving the stage. To me he confided the fact that he does not know whether it was a one-act farce he put on, or a five-act tragedy played accidentally hind-side before, with the villian-still-pursuing-her act set first instead of fourth. I am but slightly versed in the drama as played in the Black Rim the past two years. Perhaps if the star would repeat his lines––”
“For-the-Lord-sake, Lance! As a dramatic critic you’re the punkest proposition I ever slammed my door against. Talk the way you were brought up to talk and tell me the truth. What did Tom do, and how did he do it?”
Lance drew his black eyebrows together, studying carefully the ethics of the case. “Belle, you must remember that Dad is my father. Dad must 120 remember that you are my mother––technically speaking. By heck, if it wasn’t for remembering how you used to chase me up on the barn every day or so with your quirt, I’d swear that you grew up with me and are at this present moment at least two years younger than I am. However, they say you are my mother. And––do you want to know, honestly, what dad has been doing?”
“I’m going to know,” Belle informed him trenchantly.
“Then let me tell you. I’ll break it gently. Tom, your husband, the self-confessed father of your offspring, to-day rode to an alleged schoolhouse, threatened, ordered, and by other felonious devices hazed three Swedes and the four Boyle kids out of the place and toward their several homes and then when the schoolmarm very discreetly locked the door and mildly informed him that she would brain him with a twig off a sage-bush if he burst the lock, he straightway forgot that he was old enough to have a son quite old enough to frighten, abduct and otherwise lighten the monotonous life of said schoolmarm, and became a bold, bad man. He bursted that door off its hinges––”
“You’re a liar. I busted the lock,” Tom grunted, without removing the cigarette from his lips.