“Sure!”
“Honest, is one in there? Do you honest——”
But no one paid him any further attention. By this time a dozen or more people had gathered; others were arriving; and as the tumult behind the formerly green door increased, hurried discussion became general on the sidewalk. Several men said that somebody ought to go in and see what the matter was; others said that they themselves would be willing to go in, but they didn’t like to do it without a warrant; and two or three declared that nobody ought to go in just at that time. One of these was emphatic, especially upon the duty men owe to themselves. “A man owes something to himself,” he said. “A man owes it to himself not to git no forty-four in his gizzard by takin’ and pushin’ into a place where somebody’s usin’ a forty-four. A man owes it to himself to keep out o’ trouble unless he’s got some call to take and go bullin’ into it; that’s what he owes to himself!”
Another seemed to be depressed by the scandal involved. He was an unshaven person of a general appearance naïvely villainous, and, without a hat or coat, he had hurried across the street from an establishment not essentially unlike that under discussion—precisely like it, in fact, in declaring itself (though without the accent) to be a place where coffee in the French manner might be expected. “What worries me is,” he said gloomily, and he repeated this over and over, “what worries me is, it gives the neighbourhood kind of a poor name. What worries me, it’s gittin’ the neighbourhood all talked about and everything, the way you wouldn’t want it to, yourself.”
Laurence took a fancy to this man, whose dejection had a quality of pathos that seemed to imply a sympathetic nature.
“Is there one—honestly?” Laurence asked him. “Cross your heart there is one?”
The gloomy man continued to address his lament to the one or two acquaintances who were listening to him. “It’s just like this—what worries me is——”
But Laurence tugged at his soiled shirt-sleeve. “Is there honest one in there?”
“Is there one what in there?” the man asked with unexpected gruffness.
“A blind tiger!”