Rand got up. “Well, I am. I never dodged a fight yet. You watch, old man; you’ll see the fur fly yet.”
He stalked out, head back and shoulders squared aggressively. Kite watched him go, and nodded to himself with a measure of satisfaction. He was perfectly willing to see Wint forced to fight—provided some one besides himself did the forcing. Rand looked like a fighter.
Wint and Jack Routt met, on the way uptown after supper that day. Routt asked if Wint were going to the carnival again, and Wint nodded. “Keeping an eye on it,” he said.
They went to the Post Office first; and Routt stopped at his office. “Come up,” he said. “I’ll only be a minute.”
Wint went up with him. Routt dropped a letter or two on his desk; then from a lower drawer produced a bottle. “Don’t mind if I mix myself a highball, do you, Wint?” he asked cheerfully. “I don’t suppose you’ll feel called on to arrest me.”
“Go ahead,” Wint said. Routt poured some whisky into a glass, filled it from a siphon.
“You’re wise to leave the stuff alone,” he said, between the first and second sips from the glass. “It’s bad stuff unless a fellow can handle it.”
Wint nodded uneasily. There was no physical craving in him; nevertheless there was an acute desire to drink for the sake of drinking, for the sake of being like other men, for the sake of defying the danger. “That’s right,” he said. “I’m off it.”
“At that,” Routt remarked, the highball half gone, “I guess you’ve shown you can take it or let it alone. I lay off of it myself, once in a while, just to be sure I can.”
“Oh, I don’t miss it,” Wint said brazenly.