He looked at him for another moment, and then he said, angrily, to the man whom all the time he kept between him and the crowd:
“Why don’t some o’ you fellers get him out o’ here? What do you want to let him disgrace himself that-away fer?”
The man looked at Rankin and shrugged his shoulders to tell how helpless they all were.
“We’ve tried,” he said. He looked around toward Garwood, who, having concluded another speech, was tipping his glass into his mouth, his head toppling on his neck as he did so. The man turned back again to Rankin, still with that helpless look, but, suddenly, with a flash of the eye as if a new thought had just come to him, he said:
“You try, Jim; you could do it. He thinks more of you to-day than of all the rest put together.”
Rankin faced the bar and hastily swallowed his bourbon.
“No,” he said; “that’s past.”
And then he and Bailey slipped away.
“Poor Jerry!” sighed Rankin, as they went out the door.
But the Singed Cat, whose personality was destined so soon to become the passion of the cartoonists, turned and cast back at his defeated rival one of those glances from his unsearchable little eyes.