At the smacking impact of the totally unexpected blow the fat victim gasped, gurgled, tried to duck aside and stumbled and fell on the sidewalk. There were no passers-by to interfere, and for a single instant Philip stood looking down upon his handiwork in a fit of half-awed astonishment. Then the mad vengeance wave submerged him again and he sprang upon the fallen man, beating him futilely and trying to grind his face into the pavement. And at the last:
“Get up, you dirty hound!—get up and run if you want to go on living! If you ever so much as look at that girl again, I’ll cut your rotten heart out and feed it to the dogs in the street! Run! you damned——”
XIV
When Bromley came in at half-past eleven, glowing from his brisk walk in the cool night air from the Demming house in upper Fourteenth Street, he found that Philip had not yet gone to bed; was sitting with his hands locked over a knee and an extinct pipe between his teeth, his face the face of a man frowningly at odds with himself and his world.
“Heavens, Phil!” was the play-boy’s greeting, “You look as if you had lost every friend you ever had and never expected to find another. What’s gnawing you now?”
“I suppose you would call it nothing,” returned the loser moodily. “I’ve merely been finding out that I can be still another and different kind of a crazy fool.”
Bromley grinned. “You have been to the Corinthian again?”
“Oh, hell—no! I said a different kind of a fool. Drop it, Harry. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Thus extinguished, Bromley slipped out of his overcoat, struggled into a smoking jacket, and filled and lighted his pipe; all this in comradely silence. After a time the mere fact of his presence seemed to exert a mollifying effect, for when Philip spoke again it was to say, less irritably: “I have found the Dabney family, at last.”
“Good!” exclaimed the play-boy. “Nothing so very foolish about that. How did it eventuate?”