"But how about this stadium? I'm doubting Old B—"
"Trot along, Allan."
* * * *
What Mary had said was a fact. Norman Antor had not only fought a military war; Norman Antor had also fought an inward war. A war, which fought him with gallon jugs, small phials, spoons, mixing apparatus, and—a stumbling, mumbling stupor! Norman had fought with about two million lads in that military war; but now, with no aid but a strain of good blood, starting way back of his carousing Dad (but, as such traits may, skipping a notch or two, and implanting in this young lad just a grain of its old nobility of mind), was fighting again; and, just as any solitary young chap amongst that two million loyally did his part, just so was this tiny grain now doing its part; fighting valiantly in his brain. It was giving him torturing thoughts in army night-camps, of a darling, loving young girl, a part of his own family, growing up "in a pool of liquor;" thoughts in night-camps of Branton Hills' patrol-wagon trips to jail; and Darn that thought of Virginia! Virginia drunk by his own hand! Ugh!! Why not chop that stinking hand off? And, on coming back to Branton Hills, watching that darling Mary in Salvation Army uniform, tramping, talking, praying for just such low-down "liquor hounds" as——.
Oh! It was an awful fight! A long, brain-racking onslaught against a villain shut in by walls of iron! But though Norman Antor's night-camp fights with Norman Antor had "put a big kick" in his wish to "lay off that stuff," just a final blow, just an awful brain-crashing blast was still missing, so that that big right hand might point skyward, to clinch that vow. And that blast was waiting for Norman! To anybody standing around, it wasn't much of a blast; but it was! It was a mighty concussion of T.N.T., coming as Mary, young, loving, praying Mary, said, as his arms unwound from around that frail form:—
"Why, Norman! Not drunk?"
God!! What flashing, shooting, sizzling sparks shot through his brain!! Up, out, in; all kinds of ways!! What crashing bombs!!
And, that first calm night on Old Lady Flanagan's porch; that moonlit night of bliss, with soft, cuddling, snuggling, laughing, crying darling Mary!
"I say," Norman was shouting, inwardly; "that night of bliss was a night of bliss and don't anybody try to say that it wasn't!"
For it was a night on which a young man's Soul was back; back in its own Mind, now full of God's incomparably grand purity!