Like a blind man, Hawkins was groping his way toward the front door. Married! They were to be married to-morrow morning!
He found himself on the street. He hurried. Impulse drove him along. He did not reason. His mind was a tortured thing. And yet he laughed as he scurried around the corner, laughed in an unhinged way, and raised both hands above his head and pounded at the air with his doubled fists. They were to be married to-morrow morning, and he—he was to be best man. And as he laughed, his once ruddy, weather-beaten face was white as a winding-sheet, and in the whiteness there was stamped a look that it was good on no man's face to see.
And then suddenly two great tears rolled down his cheeks, opening the flood gates of his soul.
“My little girl!” he sobbed. “Daddy's little girl!”
And reason and a strange calmness came.
“John Bruce,” he said. “He loves her too.”
And in front of Mrs. Hedges' rooming-house he climbed into the driver's seat of the old traveling pawn-shop.
It didn't matter now how much noise he made.