As Mandell told the story now, Archie kept his eyes on Jackson. At the point where he had said, "I don't want to shoot you," Jackson's eyes grew moist with tears; he blinked and knocked the ashes from his cigarette with the nail of his little finger, sprinkling them on the floor. When Mandell had done, Mason looked up at Jackson.
"Well, Curly," he said, "you had the right nerve."
"Nerve!" said Mandell. "I guess so!"
"Nerve!" repeated Keenan. "He had enough for a whole mob!"
"Ach!" said Jackson, twisting away from them on his chair.
"I'd 'a' let him have it when he first bashed me," said Keenan.
"Yes!" cried Jackson suddenly, rising and catching his chair by the back. "Yes--and been settled for it! I didn't want to do it; I didn't want to get into trouble. You always was that way, Jimmy."
Archie looked at Curly Jackson as he stood with an arm outstretched toward Keenan; his figure was tall and straight and slender, and as he noted the short brown curls that gave him his name, the tanned cheeks, the attitude in which he held himself, something confused Archie, some thought he could not catch--some idea that evaded him, coming near till he was just on the point of grasping it, then eluding him, like a name one tries desperately to recall.
"I didn't have my finger on the trigger," Jackson went on, speaking in his high, shrill, excited voice. "I held it on the trigger-guard all the time."
And then suddenly it came to Archie--that bronzed skin, that set of the shoulders, that trimness, that alertness, that coolness, Jackson could have got nowhere but in the army. He had been a soldier--what was more, he had been a regular. And Archie felt something like devotion for him.