"Can you do it?" the cook asked sarcastically.
"Who'd bother t' try?"
Hanlon looked up, blandly. "You couldn't expect that of Mr. Gorton, Cookie. To teach an animal to do tricks you have to know more than it does."
"Why, you ..." Gorton started forward, his face aflame, while the other men roared with laughter at the rough wit.
But the big guard did not reach Hanlon. One of the newer guards, a giant Swede named Jenssen, stopped him. "Aw, lay off the kid, Gort. He's okay. That stunt of feeding the Greenies fertilizer makes 'em turn out lots more work, and we'll get us bigger bonuses 'cause of it."
But Gorton was not the type to know when to quit. Nor was he high enough in the ethical scale to know appreciation for the fact that it was the very man he had been reviling who was the first to go to his aid when he was hurt.
Hanlon had come to realize that the big man was determined to provoke him to another fight. He knew that tempers were edgy and explosive in this enervating heat, and usually tried to bear Gorton's insults and petty meannesses in silence. He wouldn't demean himself by descending to the big guard's low level ... although occasionally, when the heat was too much even for him, as tonight, he couldn't resist making some answer.
Gorton, he had long since decided, was one of those men who, having nothing of worth to offer the world, did their utmost to tear down and humiliate anyone who had. And his smallness of soul and intellect were shown by the sort of tricks he was continually pulling, thinking them smart.
Such as scrawling with chalk on Hanlon's room door, "Super's pet"; continually upsetting Hanlon's beverage cup, or "accidentally" dropping things in Hanlon's plate of food.
The young SS man could have moved to another place at the table, but he wouldn't give the big guard that satisfaction.